The Dinner

Without thinking about it any further, I decided that the moment had arrived. I pulled Michel’s phone out of my pocket. He looked at my hand, then raised his eyes to meet mine.

‘You looked,’ he said; his voice didn’t sound threatening at all any more, more like fatigued – resigned.

‘Yeah,’ I said. I shrugged, the way you shrug over something that can’t be changed any more anyway. ‘Michel …’ I began.

‘What did you look at?’ He took his phone out of my hand, slid it open, then closed it again.

‘Well … the ATM machine … and the vagrant at the subway station …’

I grinned – a fairly stupid grin, I imagined, and completely out of place, but I had decided to do it that way, that this would be my approach: I would act the ignoramus, a rather naive father who didn’t think it was such a big deal that his son beat up vagrants and set fire to the homeless. Yes, naivety was the right way to do it, it shouldn’t be too hard for me to play the naive father; after all, that was what I was: naive.

‘Jackass …’ I said, still with a grin.

‘Does Mama know?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.

What does Mama know about, was what I really wanted to ask, but it was still too soon for that. I thought back to the evening when the footage from that ATM cubicle had first been broadcast. Claire had asked whether I wanted the last of the wine, or whether she should open a new bottle. Then she had gone, that’s right, to the kitchen. Meanwhile, the female presenter of Opsporing Verzocht had made an urgent appeal to viewers to call the number at the bottom of the screen if they had any information that might lead to the arrest of the culprits. ‘You can, of course, also alert your local police,’ she said, turning her noble and offended expression on me. ‘What is the world coming to?’ that expression said.

That evening, after Claire had crawled into bed with a book, I went upstairs to Michel’s room. I saw a strip of light under his door. I remember standing there in the hallway for a full sixty seconds. I asked myself in all seriousness what would happen if I said nothing at all. If I just carried on with my life, like everyone else. I thought about happiness – about happy couples, and about my son’s eyes.

But then I thought about all those other people who had watched the programme: students at Rick and Beau’s high school who had been at that party on the same night – and who may have seen the same thing I had. I thought about the people here in the neighbourhood, here on our street: neighbours and shopkeepers who had seen the somewhat reserved but always-friendly boy traipsing past with his sports bag, his quilted jacket and his knitted cap.

Last of all, I thought about my brother. He was no genius, in a certain sense you could even call him mentally deficient. If the opinion polls were right, after the upcoming elections he would be sworn in as our new prime minister. Had he been watching? And Babette? An outsider would never recognize our children from the security-camera footage, I told myself, but there is something about parents that makes them able to pick their children out of thousands: on a crowded beach, a playground, in fuzzy black-and-white footage …

‘Michel! Are you still up?’ I knocked on his door and he opened it.

‘Jesus, Dad!’ he said when he saw my face. ‘What is it?’

After that it had all gone fairly quickly, at least more quickly than I had expected. In fact, he seemed almost relieved that now there was someone else who knew too.

‘Jesus,’ he said a few times. ‘Jesus, man. This is really weird, you know, to be talking about this now, the two of us.’

He made it sound as though that was all it was, weird: as though, for example, we had been discussing the most intimate details of how he had tried to pick up a girl at a school party. In a way, of course, he was right: I never had tried to bring up things like this before. But the weirdest thing of all was the reticence I noticed in myself from the very start. As though I were giving him the liberty not to tell everything to me, his father, should that prove too painful for him.

‘We didn’t know, right?’ he said. ‘How were we supposed to know that there was still something in that jerrycan? It was empty, I swear it was empty.’

Did it matter whether he and his cousin were actually ignorant of the fact that empty jerrycans can explode too? Or whether they were only feigning ignorance of something that can be assumed to be common knowledge? Gasification, petrol fumes. Never hold a match up to an empty tank. Why else weren’t you allowed to use your cell phone at the pumps? Because of petrol fumes and the danger of an explosion.

Right?

But I didn’t say any of that. As I said before, I didn’t try to refute the arguments with which Michel tried to prove his innocence. After all, how innocent was he, anyway? Are you innocent when you throw a desk lamp at someone’s head, but guilty when you accidentally set that same person on fire?

‘Does Mama know?’ Yes, he had asked me that. Even back then.

I shook my head. And that’s how we stood there for a while in his room, saying nothing, both of us with our hands in our pockets. I didn’t press on. I didn’t, for example, ask what had got into him. What he and his cousin had been thinking when they started pelting the homeless woman with objects.

Looking back on it, in fact, I know for a certainty that, then and there, during those few minutes of silence, as we stood with our hands in our pockets, I had already made up my mind. I couldn’t help thinking about the time Michel had kicked a ball through the window of a bike shop, when he was eight. Together we had gone to the owner to offer to pay for the damage. But the owner wasn’t satisfied with that. He had burst into a tirade about ‘the riff-raff’ who played soccer in front of his store, each and every day, and who kicked the ball against the window ‘on purpose’. Sooner or later it was bound to break, he said, you could count on that. ‘And that’s exactly what those punks are hoping for,’ he added.

I had been holding Michel’s hand as we listened to the owner of the bike shop. My eight-year-old son had looked down at the floor guiltily, and occasionally squeezed my fingers.

It was that combination, the combination of the bitter bike dealer who numbered Michel among the punks and my son who responded so guiltily to his tirade, that threw the switch inside my head.

‘Why don’t you just shut up?’ I said.

The shop owner was standing behind his counter, he seemed at first to think he had misunderstood me. ‘What did you say?’ he asked.

‘You heard me loud and clear, asshole. I came here with my son to offer to pay for your shitty window, not to listen to your crap about kids playing soccer. What’s the big deal, you fucking idiot? A ball through the window. That doesn’t give you any right to call an eight-year-old boy a punk. I came here to pay for the damage, but now you’re not getting a cent. Go figure out for yourself where the money’s coming from.’

‘Excuse me, my good man, but I’m not going to stand here and let myself be insulted,’ he said as he started to come around from behind the counter. ‘Those boys broke my window, I didn’t do it myself.’

Beside the counter was a bicycle pump, an old-fashioned upright model; the pump itself was bolted at the bottom to a wooden plank. I leaned down and picked it up.

‘I’d stay where I was if I were you,’ I said calmly. ‘The only thing that’s been damaged so far is a window.’

There was something about my voice, I still remember, that made the bike dealer stop, then step back behind the counter. It had, indeed, sounded unnaturally calm. I was not on edge, the hand with which I gripped the pump was not shaking in the slightest. The bike dealer had called me a good man, and maybe I looked like one, but I was not a good man.

‘Oh, hold on,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to do anything crazy, are we?’

I felt Michel’s hand around my fingers. He squeezed them again, harder than the first few times. I squeezed back.

‘How much is the window?’

He blinked his eyes. ‘I’ve got insurance,’ he said. ‘It’s just that—’

‘That’s not what I asked. I asked how much it cost.’

‘A hundred … a hundred-and-fifty guilders. Two hundred in total, with labour, etcetera.’

In order to take the money out of my pocket, I had to let go of Michel’s hand. I laid two one-hundred guilder bills on the counter.

‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is what I came for. Not to listen to your sick bullshit about a couple of kids kicking a ball.’

I let go of the pump as well now. I registered a sense of fatigue. And regret. It was the same fatigue and regret you feel when you miss a tennis ball: you were planning to smash it, but you swing hard and miss, the arm holding the racket meets no resistance and lashes wildly through the air.

I knew for sure, and in the depths of my being I still know, that I was sorry the bike dealer had backed off so quickly. I would have felt less tired had I been able to use the pump.

‘So, we fixed that nicely, didn’t we, buddy?’ I said on the way home.

Michel took my hand again, but said nothing. When I looked over, I saw that there were tears in his eyes.

‘What is it, fella?’ I asked. I stopped and squatted down in front of him. He bit his lower lip, and then he really began to cry.

‘Michel!’ I said. ‘Michel, listen. There’s no reason to be sad. That was a nasty man. I told him that. You didn’t do anything wrong. All you did was kick a ball through a window. It was an accident. Accidents happen, but that’s no reason for him to talk about you like that.’

‘Mama,’ he said now, between sobs. ‘Mama …’

I felt something inside my body stiffen, or perhaps what I felt was the way something nameless and indefinable unfolded: a folding trellis, tent poles, an umbrella – I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand up straight again.

‘Mama? Do you want to go to Mama?’

He nodded emphatically and wiped his teary cheeks with his fingers.

‘Shall we hurry up and go to Mama then?’ I said. ‘Shall we tell Mama about everything? What the two of us did?’

‘Yeah,’ he peeped.

When I stood up, I really did think that I heard something snap, in my spine, or maybe deeper than that. I took his hand and we set off. At the corner of our street I looked down; his face was still red and wet with tears, but the crying had stopped.

‘Did you see how scared that guy was?’ I said. ‘We almost didn’t have to do a thing. We wouldn’t even have had to pay him for that window. But I don’t think that would have been right. When you break something, even it’s an accident, you have to pay for the damage.’

Michel said nothing until we arrived at the front door.

‘Daddy?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Were you really going to hit that man? With the bicycle pump?’

I had already put the key in the lock, but now I squatted down in front of him again. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘That man is not a good man. That man is just a piece of trash who hates kids who are playing. It doesn’t matter whether I would have hit him over the head with that pump. Besides, if I had, he would only have had himself to blame. No, what matters is that he thought I was going to hit him, and that was enough.’

Michel looked at me earnestly; I had chosen my words carefully, because I didn’t want to make him cry again. But his eyes were already almost dry, he was listening carefully, and then he nodded slowly.

I put my arms around him and hugged him. ‘How about if we don’t tell Mama about the bicycle pump?’ I said. ‘Shall we keep that as our little secret?’

He nodded again.

Later that afternoon he went into town with Claire to buy some clothes. At the table that evening he was quieter and more serious than usual. I winked at him once, but he didn’t wink back.

When his bedtime arrived, Claire had just sat down on the couch to watch a movie she really wanted to see. ‘Sit back and enjoy it, I’ll take him up,’ I said.

And so we lay beside each other on his bed and chewed the fat a little: innocent chit-chat, about soccer and a new computer game he was saving up for. I had resolved not to bring up the incident in the bike shop, not unless he started in about it himself.

I kissed him goodnight and was about to turn off the nightlight when he leaned over and threw his arms around me. He squeezed hard; he had never put that much force behind a hug before, he pressed his head against my chest.

‘Dad,’ he said. ‘Dear old dad.’

23

‘You know what the best thing would be?’ I said that evening in his room, after he had told me the whole story and swore again that he and Rick had never been planning to set anyone on fire.

‘It was a joke,’ he’d said. ‘And it was …’ – he grimaced in disgust – ‘you should have smelled how it stank,’ he said.

I nodded, my mind was already made up. I did what I thought I had to do as a father: I put myself in my son’s shoes. I put myself in Michel’s position: how he had been on his way home from the school party, along with Rick and Beau. And how they had decided to withdraw some cash – and what they found in the ATM cubicle.

I put myself in his shoes. I formed an idea of how I myself would have reacted to the living creature in the sleeping bag, lying in my way there; to the stench; to the simple fact that someone, a person (I am purposely avoiding words here like homeless person or vagrant), how a person thinks that ATM cubicles are a place to sleep; a person who then reacts indignantly when two boys try to convince her otherwise; a person who becomes tetchy when disturbed in her sleep; a spoiled reaction, in other words, the kind of reaction you see more often from people who think they have a right to something.

Hadn’t Michel told me that the woman had sounded prim? A prim accent, a good family, someone from the upper classes. Until now, little had been revealed about the homeless woman’s background. Perhaps for good reason. Maybe this was the black sheep of a well-to-do family whose members were completely used to ordering around the people who worked for them.

And then there was something else. This was the Netherlands. This was not the Bronx, we were not in the slums of Johannesburg or Rio de Janeiro. In Holland you had a social safety net. No one had to lie around and get in the way in an ATM cubicle.

‘You know what the best thing would be?’ I said. ‘To just forget it for the time being. As long as nothing happens, nothing is happening.’

My son looked at me for a few seconds. Maybe he felt he was too big to say ‘dear old dad’ any more, but beside the fear in his eyes I also saw thankfulness.

‘You think maybe?’ he said.

24

And now, in the restaurant garden, we were standing across from each other again, not speaking a word. Michel slid his cell phone open and closed a few times, then put it in his coat pocket.

‘Michel,’ I began.

He didn’t look at me, he had his head turned to the other side now, towards the darkened park; his face remained in darkness too. ‘I don’t have time for this right now,’ he said. ‘I have to get going.’

‘Michel. Why didn’t you tell me? About those videos? Or at least about that one video. Back then? Back when there was still time?’

He ran his fingers over his nose, scuffed his white tennis shoes in the gravel and shrugged.

‘Michel?’

He looked at the ground. ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ he said.

For one single moment I thought about the father I could have been, perhaps the one I should have been, the father who would now say, ‘It makes a big difference!’ The time for sermonizing was past, though, that bridge had already been crossed: back then, on the night of the TV broadcast, in his room. Or maybe even before that.

A few days ago, not long after Serge had called me about the get-together at the restaurant, I had watched the episode of Opsporing Verzocht again on the Internet. It seemed like a good idea, it might make me better prepared for the dinner.

‘We need to talk,’ Serge had said.

‘About what?’ I replied. Playing ignorant, that seemed the best thing to me.

At the other end of the line, my brother breathed a deep sigh.

‘I think we’re past the stage of my needing to tell you that,’ he said.

‘Does Babette know?’

‘Yes. That’s why I want to talk about it with the four of us. It has to do with all of us. They’re our children.’

It struck me that he had not asked in turn whether Claire knew. Apparently he assumed she did – or else he didn’t care. After that he had named the restaurant, the restaurant where they knew him; the seven-month waiting list, he said, would pose no obstacle.

Did Claire know too? I thought now, as I looked at my son walking towards his bike, getting ready to leave.

‘Michel, wait a minute,’ I said. We need to talk, that other father would have said, the father I was not.

I had watched the footage again, with this evening in mind, the laughing boys who threw a desk lamp and garbage bags at the invisible homeless person. And finally the flash of exploding gas fumes, the boys running away, the telephone numbers you could call – or the local police you could also alert.

I watched it one more time, especially the last bit, with the jerrycan and the tossing of what I knew by then was a lighter. A Zippo, a lighter with a lid, the kind of lighter that goes out only when you click the lid shut. What were two boys, neither of whom smoked, doing with a lighter? There were questions I hadn’t asked, purely because I didn’t feel the need to know everything, from an urgent need not to know everything, you could also say – but this one I had.

‘To give people a light,’ Michel had replied without hesitation. ‘Girls,’ he added, when I suppose I looked at him a bit blankly. ‘Girls ask you for a light, for a joint or a Marlboro Light, you miss a chance when you don’t have anything in your pocket.’

As I said, I watched that last part twice. After the flash of light the boys disappeared out the glass door. You saw the door shut, then the footage stopped.

The second time, though, I suddenly saw something I hadn’t noticed before. I clicked the video back to the point where Michel and Rick ran out the door. From the moment the door fell shut, I put the player on slow, and then slower, frame by frame.

Do I have to go into detail about the physical symptoms that accompanied my discovery? I believe they should be obvious. The pounding heart, the dry lips and tongue, the icicle inside the head, at the back, its point jamming into the topmost vertebra, into the hollow space without bone or cartilage where the skull starts, at the moment when I froze the very last frame from the security camera.

There, at the bottom right: something white. Something white that no one would notice the first time they saw it, because everyone assumed they had already seen the worst of it. The lamp, the garbage bags, the jerrycan … The time had come to shake one’s head and murmur words of disapproval: young people; the world; defenceless; murder; video clips; computer games; labour camps; stiffer sentences; the death penalty.

The image froze and I stared at the white thing. Outside it was completely dark; in the glass door you could see a reflection of part of the inside of the ATM cubicle: the grey tile floor, the machine itself with its keyboard and screen, and the brand, the logo, I believe one should say, of the bank to which the ATM machine belonged.

In theory, the white thing could just have been a reflection, the reflection of fluorescent lighting off something inside the cubicle itself – off one of the objects with which the boys had pelted the homeless woman, for example.

But that, indeed, was entirely theoretical. The white thing was outside, the camera made it clear that it was outside, on the street. A random viewer would never have noticed, especially not on the broadcast of Opsporing Verzocht. You had to freeze the film, or view it frame by frame, as I had done, and even then …

Even then you had to know what you were seeing. That’s what it boiled down to. I knew what I was seeing, because I had immediately recognized the white thing for what it was.

I clicked on Full Screen. The image was larger now, but also more blurry and formless. I couldn’t help but think of Blow-Up, the Michelangelo Antonioni film in which a photographer, while enlarging a picture, sees a pistol lying under a bush: a murder weapon, as it turns out later. But here, on this computer, enlargement didn’t help at all. I clicked on Minimize and picked up the magnifying glass that was lying on my desk.

With the magnifier, it was only a matter of adjusting the distance. As I moved it in and out in front of the screen, the image became sharper. Sharper and bigger.

Ever-sharper and ever-bigger. I saw confirmed what I had seen correctly the first time I looked: a tennis shoe. A white tennis shoe of the kind countless people wear; countless people like my son and my nephew.

That last thought made me pause for a moment, but no more than a tenth of a second: one tennis shoe could point to tens of thousands of tennis-shoe wearers, but conversely, tens of thousands of tennis shoes would be hard to trace back to one, specific wearer.

No, that wasn’t really what had made me stop and think. It was about the signal being given, or, better yet, the meaning of the white tennis shoe outside the glass door of the cubicle. Or even better yet, the meanings.

I took another close look; I zoomed in and out with the magnifying glass. Upon closer examination, you could see a slight shift in colour above the tennis shoe; the blackness of the street outside was here just a tad less black. That was probably the leg, the trouser leg of the tennis-shoe wearer who was stepping into frame.

They had come back. That was the first meaning. The second meaning was that the police, possibly in collaboration with the makers of Opsporing Verzocht, had decided not to include this final moment in the broadcast.

Anything was possible of course. The tennis shoe might belong to someone other than Michel or Rick, a chance passer-by who happened to arrive thirty seconds after the boys had left the cubicle. But that didn’t seem very likely, not at that hour of the night, on that street, somewhere in an outlying neighbourhood. Besides, that would make this passer-by a witness who might have seen the boys. A material witness, someone the police would have wanted to summon via the broadcast to report what he knew.

All in all, there was only one likely explanation for the white tennis shoe, the one explanation that I had hit upon immediately (all this, the zooming in on the tennis shoe with the magnifying glass and the drawing of the conclusion, had actually taken less than a couple of seconds): they had come back. Michel and Rick had come back to see with their own eyes what they had done.

This was all fairly disturbing, albeit no more than that. The truly frightening thing had to do with how this final footage had been cut from the broadcast of Opsporing Verzocht. I tried to figure out what reason they might have not to show the images. Perhaps there was something there that made Michel or Rick (or both) easier to recognize? But wouldn’t that have been an additional reason to actually show the images?

And what if the footage was simply too unimportant? I thought for all of a hopeful three seconds. A trivial afterthought that wouldn’t help the viewer at all? No, I realized right away. The fact that they had come back was too important to simply omit.

So there was something to be seen there, something that might be kept from the viewer: something only the police and the culprits knew about.

You sometimes read about the police leaving certain facts out of the publicity surrounding an investigation: the precise nature of the murder weapon, or a sign that the murderer had left beside, or on, his victim. To prevent mentally disturbed individuals from claiming a crime – or copying it.

For the first time in weeks I wondered whether Michel and Rick themselves had actually seen the security-camera footage. I had told Michel about it on the evening of the broadcast, I had told him they had been filmed by a security camera, but that they were almost unrecognizable. So for the time being, I’d added, there was nothing to worry about. During the days that followed, we hadn’t touched on the subject of the security camera either. I was acting on the basis that it was better not to come back to any of it, not to rake up our secret.

I was hoping, in fact, that it would blow over, that with the passing of time the interest would fade, that people would be occupied by other, newer news, and that the exploding jerrycan would be erased from their collective memory. A war needed to break out somewhere; a terrorist attack might be even better, plenty of fatalities, lots of civilian casualties over whom people could shake their heads in dismay. Ambulances driving up and away, the twisted steel of train or subway cars, a ten-storey building with the façade blown out – that was the only way the homeless woman in the ATM cubicle could vanish into the background, become an occurrence, a minor incident amid greater incidents.

That was what I had hoped for during those first few weeks. The news would become old news, perhaps not within a month, but definitely within six months – in any case after a year. By that time the police, too, would be occupied with other, more urgent matters. Fewer and fewer detectives would be assigned to the case, as they referred to it, and I was under no illusions about that lone, dogged detective who sinks his teeth into an unsolved crime and doesn’t let go for years: such detectives exist only in TV series.

After those six months, after that year, we would be able to go on living as a happy family. A scar would remain somewhere, true enough, but a scar does not have to get in the way of happiness. In the meantime, I would act as normally as possible. Do normal things. Go out to dinner occasionally, to the movies, take Michel to a soccer match.

At the table, during our evening meals, I kept a close eye on my wife. I was searching for tiny changes in her behaviour, anything that might show that she, in turn, suspected a connection between the images from the security camera and our own happy family.

‘What is it?’ she asked on one of those evenings; apparently I had taken the keeping a close eye a bit too literally. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Was I looking at something?’

Claire couldn’t help but laugh; she laid her hand on mine and squeezed my fingers gently.

At such moments I meticulously avoided looking at my son. I didn’t want any knowing glances, I wasn’t going to wink at him or show in any other way that we were still sharing a secret. I wanted everything to be normal. A shared secret would have excluded Claire – his mother, my wife – and that would create a greater threat to our happy family than the entire incident in the ATM cubicle.

Without knowing glances – without winks – there was in fact no secret: that was my reasoning. It might be hard for us to put the events in the cubicle out of our minds, but in the course of time they would start to exist outside us – just as they did for other people. But what we did have to forget was the secret. And the best thing was to start forgetting as soon as possible.

25

That was the plan. That had been the plan before I reran the broadcast of Opsporing Verzocht and saw the white tennis shoe.

The next step I took simply on a hunch. Perhaps there was more footage to be found, I thought to myself. Or rather, perhaps the missing footage, accidentally or not, had ended up on another site.

I clicked onto YouTube. The chances were slim, but it was worth a try. In Search I typed the name of the bank to which the ATM machine belonged, and after that the words ‘homeless’ and ‘death’.

No fewer than thirty-four hits appeared. I scrolled down past the little screens. On all of them, the opening frame was more or less the same: the heads and knitted caps of two laughing boys. Only the accompanying titles and the brief description of the clip itself were any different. Dutch Boys [name of the bank] Murder was one of the most straightforward. Don’t Try this at Home – Fire Bomb Kills Homeless Woman was another. Each and every one of the clips was extremely popular – the counter showed that most of them had been viewed thousands of times.

I clicked on one at random and watched again, albeit in a choppier, edited version, the throwing of the desk lamp, the garbage bags and the jerrycan. I looked at a couple more. In one montage entitled [name of the city] Hottest New Tourist Attraction: Set Your Money on Fire!, someone had added canned laughter to the images. Each time a new object was thrown at the homeless woman, a wave of laughter followed. The laughter reached a hysterical climax when the lighter was thrown, and ended with thundering applause.

Most of the videos did not include the shot of the white tennis shoe; they stopped right after the flash of light and the boys running away.

Looking back, I don’t know exactly why I clicked on the next video too. It didn’t look any different from the other thirty-three. The opening shot was roughly the same: two laughing boys in knitted caps, although here they were already picking up the office chair.

Perhaps it was the title, Men in Black III. Not a jokey title for starters, not like most of the others. But it was also the first and, as I found out subsequently, the only title that did not refer to the events shown but indirectly to the culprits themselves.

Men in Black III began with the throwing of the office chair, then came the garbage bags, the lamp and the jerrycan. But there was an essential difference. Whenever both or either of the two boys came into reasonably sharp focus, the film slowed down. And every time that happened you heard ominous music, more a sort of zooming tone, a deep, gurgling noise that is associated primarily with submarine and shipwreck disaster movies. As a result, all attention was focused on Michel and Rick, and less on the throwing of the things they had found beside the tree.

Who are these boys? the slow-motion images, in combination with the doomsday music, seemed to ask. What it is they’re doing, we know by now. But who are they?

The zinger came all the way at the end. After the flash and the slamming door, the screen went black. I was getting ready to click to the next video, but the time line at the bottom of the screen showed that Men in Black III lasted a total of two minutes and fifty-eight seconds, and that we were now only at two minutes and thirty-eight.

As I said, I had almost clicked away. I wasn’t expecting anything more than for the screen to remain black for another twenty seconds – the music had swelled again, the only thing left would probably be credits, I figured, nothing more than that.

How would this evening, our dinner at the restaurant, have proceeded, had I indeed quit right then and there?

In ignorance, that was the answer. At least, in relative ignorance. I could have lived on for a few more days, or maybe a few weeks or months, in my dreams about happy families. I would only have needed to hold my own family up for comparison with my brother’s for the space of one evening; I could have seen how Babette tried to cover up her tears behind her tinted glasses and how joylessly my brother wolfed down his meat in a couple of bites. Then I would have walked home with my wife, I would have placed my arm around her waist and, without looking at each other, we would both have known that the happy families really were all alike.

The screen shifted from black to grey. You saw the door of the ATM cubicle again, but this time from the outside. The quality of the images was a lot worse, like the resolution of the camera on a cell phone, I realized right away.

The white tennis shoe.

They had come back.

They had come back to record what they had done.

‘Holy shit!’ said a voice off-camera. (Rick)

‘Aw, yuck!’ said a second voice. (Michel)

The camera was now pointed at the foot end of the sleeping bag. The cubicle was filled with a bluish haze. Excruciatingly slowly, the camera panned up along the sleeping bag.

‘Let’s go.’ (Rick)

‘At least it doesn’t smell as gross here any more.’ (Michel)

‘Michel … come on …’

‘Come on yourself, go and stand beside it. You have to say Jackass. At least then we’ve got that.’

‘I’m goin’ …’

‘No, asshole! You’re staying!’

At the top of the sleeping bag, the camera stopped. The image froze there, then faded to black. In red letters, the following text appeared on screen:

Men in Black III

The Sequel

coming soon

I waited a few days. Michel went out often, but he always took his cell phone with him, so the chance presented itself only today – only this evening, right before we were to leave for the restaurant. While he was fixing his tyre in the garden, I went to his room.

I had actually assumed he would have deleted it. I was hoping, praying, that he had deleted it. Somehow I also hoped that, having seen the images on YouTube, I had now seen everything – that they had stopped there.

But that wasn’t the case.

It was only a few hours ago that I saw the rest.

26

‘Michel,’ I said to my son, who had already turned to leave, who had said that it didn’t make any difference, ‘Michel, you have to delete those films. You should have done it a long time ago, but now it’s really important.’

He stopped. Again he scraped his white Nikes through the gravel.

‘Aw, Dad,’ he began. It seemed as though he was going to say something, but he only shook his head.

In both videos I had seen and heard how he pushed his cousin around, and sometimes even snarled at him. That was precisely what Serge had always insinuated, and would doubtless repeat tonight: that Michel was a bad influence on Rick. I had always denied that; I had always thought it an easy way for my brother to duck his own responsibility for his son’s actions.

But since a few hours ago – in fact, since much longer ago than that, of course – I knew it was true. Michel was the leader of the two: Michel called the shots, Rick was the subservient goon. And, deep in my heart, that division of roles pleased me. Better that than the other way around, I thought. Michel had never been pestered at school; even then he’d gathered around him a whole crew of submissive friends who wanted nothing more than to be around my son. I knew from experience how parents could suffer when their children were bullied. I had never suffered.

‘You know what would be even better?’ I said. ‘For you to throw away that whole cell phone. Somewhere where they’ll never find it again.’ I looked around. ‘Here, for example.’ I pointed at the little bridge over which he had just come cycling up. ‘In the water. If you want, we’ll go buy a new one on Monday. How long have you had this one, anyway? We’ll just say it got ripped off and we’ll renew the subscription, and on Monday you’ll have the newest Samsung, or a Nokia, whatever you want …’

I held out my hand, palm up.

‘Do you want me to do it for you?’ I asked.

He looked at me. I saw the eyes I had been seeing all my life, but also something I would rather not have seen: he looked at me in a way that said I was getting worked up about nothing, that I was just a fussy, worried father, a worried father who wants to know what time his son will be coming home from a party.

‘Michel, this isn’t about a party or something,’ I said, faster and louder than I’d meant to. ‘This is about your future—’ Another one of those abstract terms: the future, I thought, and I was sorry right away that I had said it. ‘Why the hell did you two put that footage on the Internet?’

Don’t swear, I admonished myself. When you start swearing you sound like those second-rate movie hams you hate so much. But I was almost screaming now, anyone at the door of the restaurant, anyone close to the lectern or the cloakroom could have heard me.

‘Was that cool, too? Or tough? Didn’t that make any difference either? Men in Black III! For God’s sake, what were you two thinking?’

He had put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and bowed his head, so that I could just barely see his eyes beneath the edge of the black knitted cap.

‘That wasn’t us,’ he said.

The door of the restaurant swung open, there was laughter and a group of people came outside. Two men and a woman. The men wore tailored suits and had their hands in their pockets, the woman was wearing a silvery, almost backless dress and carried a matching shoulder bag.

‘Did you really say that?’ the woman asked, taking a couple of unsteady steps in her high heels, which were silver as well. ‘To Ernst?’

One of the men pulled a set of car keys from his pocket and tossed them in the air. ‘Why not?’ he said: he had to stretch his arm out to catch the keys again.

‘You must be crazy!’ the woman shrilled. Their shoes squeaked on the gravel as they passed.

‘Which of us is still in any state to drive?’ said the other man, and all three of them burst out laughing.

‘Okay, wait a minute,’ I said, after the threesome had reached the end of the gravel path and turned left towards the footbridge. ‘The two of you set a homeless person on fire and then you film it. On your cell phone. Just like with that alcoholic at the subway station.’ I noticed that the man who had been smacked around on the platform had now become an alcoholic. In my words. Perhaps an alcoholic really did deserve to be smacked around more than someone who drinks two or three glasses a day. ‘And then suddenly it’s right there on the Internet, because that’s what you guys want, isn’t it? For as many people as possible to see it?’ Had they put the alcoholic on YouTube as well? it occurred to me then. ‘Is that alcoholic on there too?’ I asked right away, for good measure.

Michel breathed a sigh. ‘Dad! You’re not listening!’

‘I am listening. I listen too much. I—’

Again the door of the restaurant opened, a man in a suit came out and looked around, took a few steps to one side so that he was beside the entrance but out of the light, and lit a cigarette. ‘Goddam it,’ I said.

Michel turned around and walked to his bike.

‘Michel, where are you going? I’m not finished yet.’

But he kept on walking, he pulled a key out of his pocket and stuck it in the lock, which sprang open with a bang. I looked quickly at the man smoking beside the entrance.

‘Michel,’ I said, quietly but urgently, ‘you can’t just walk away from this. What are we going to do about it? Are there more of those films I haven’t seen? Will I have to see them later on, on YouTube first? Or are you going to tell me now whether—’

‘Dad!’ Michel spun around and grabbed my forearm; he yanked it hard and said: ‘Now just shut up!’

Stunned, I looked into my son’s eyes. His honest eyes in which – there was no use denying it – I now saw only hatred. I caught myself glancing to one side as well, at the smoking man.

I grinned at my son; I couldn’t see it myself, but it must have been a stupid grin. ‘Okay, I’ll shut up,’ I said.

Michel let go of my arm; he bit his lower lip and shook his head. ‘Christ! When are you going to start acting normal?’

I felt a cold stabbing in my chest. Any other father would now have said something like,‘Who’s acting normal here? Huh? Who? Who’s acting normal?’ But I wasn’t a father like all other fathers. I knew what my son was getting at. I wished that I could put my arms around him and press him against me. But he would probably push me away in disgust. I knew for certain that a physical rejection like that would be too much, that I would burst into tears right there and wouldn’t be able to stop.

‘Oh, buddy,’ I said.

I needed to stay calm, I told myself. I had to listen. I remembered now that Michel had said I wasn’t listening.

‘Okay, I’m all ears,’ I said.

He shook his head again. Then he pulled his bike resolutely from the rack.

‘Wait a minute!’ I said. I kept a hold of myself, I even stepped to one side, as though I didn’t want to get in his way. But before I knew it I had my hand on his forearm.

Michel looked at the hand as though some strange insect had landed on his arm, then he looked at me.

At that point we were very close to something, I realized. Something that couldn’t be undone later on. I took my hand off his arm.

‘Michel, there’s something else,’ I said.

‘Dad, please.’

‘Someone called you.’

He stared at me; it wouldn’t have surprised me much to have felt his fist in my face a moment later: his knuckles hard against my upper lip, or higher, against my nose, blood would flow, but it would make a number of things clearer. More out in the open.

But nothing happened. ‘When?’ he asked quietly.

‘Michel, I hope you’ll forgive me, I shouldn’t have, but … it was because of those films, I wanted to … I was trying to …’

‘When?’ My son took his foot off the pedal and planted both feet firmly on the gravel.

‘A little while ago, it was a message. I listened to the message.’

‘Who was it from?’

‘From B— from Faso.’ I shrugged, I grinned. ‘That’s what you guys call him, right? Faso?’

I saw it plainly, there could be no mistake about it: my son’s expression hardened. There wasn’t enough light here, but I could have sworn that his face also turned a few shades paler.

‘What did he want?’

He sounded calm. Or no, not calm. He was trying to sound casual, bored almost, as though the fact that his adopted cousin had called him tonight was of no significance.

But he had given himself away. The significance lay in something very different: in the fact that his father had been listening to his messages. That wasn’t normal. Any other father would have thought twice before doing that. In fact, that’s what I had done. I had thought twice. Michel should have been enraged, he should have screamed: what gives you the right to listen to my voicemail? That would have been normal.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He asked you to call back.’ In that fake, chummy tone of his, I almost added.

‘Okay,’ Michel said. He nodded slightly. ‘Okay,’ he said again.

Suddenly, I remembered something. Just a while ago, when he had called his own phone and got me on the line, he had said he was looking for a number. That he was coming to get his cell phone because he needed a number. I thought I knew now which number that was. But I didn’t ask him. Because there was something else I remembered too.

‘You said I wasn’t listening,’ I said. ‘But I did listen. When we were talking about the two of you putting that video up on YouTube.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You said that wasn’t you.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So who was it? Who put it there?’

Sometimes you answer a question by asking it out loud.

I looked at my son. And he looked back.

‘Faso?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

27

In the silence that fell then, the only sounds were those from the park and the street across the water: the brief flap of birds’ wings in the branches, a car accelerating, a church bell striking once – a silence during which my son and I looked at each other.

I couldn’t be absolutely certain, but I thought I saw a moistness in Michel’s eyes. His look, in any case, left no room for misinterpretation. You finally get it? that look said.

During the same silence, a cell phone began ringing, in my left pocket. Ringing and buzzing. My hearing seemed to be getting worse lately, so I had chosen Old Phone as my ringtone, an old-fashioned ringing that reminded you of a classic, black Bakelite telephone, and that I could hear no matter what.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket, intending to dismiss the call, until I saw the name on my screen: Claire.

‘Hello?’

I gestured to Michel not to go, but he had already crossed his arms and leaned them on the handlebars; suddenly he seemed in less of a hurry to get away.

‘Where are you?’ my wife asked. Her voice was quiet but insistent, the restaurant noises in the background almost drowned it out. ‘What’s taking you so long?’

‘I’m outside.’

‘What are you doing out there? We’ve almost finished the main course. I thought you were going to come back right away.’

‘I’m out here with Michel.’

I had actually meant to say ‘with our son’, but I didn’t.

We were silent for a moment.

‘I’m coming,’ Claire said.

‘No, wait! He’s got to … Michel was just getting ready to go …’

But the connection had already been broken.

Your father doesn’t know about any of this, and I want to keep it that way. I thought about my wife who would be coming out the door of the restaurant any moment, and about the way I would look at her then. Or rather, whether I would be able to look at her in the same way I had a couple of hours ago, in the café for regular people, when she’d asked if I also thought Michel had been acting strange lately.

I was wondering, in other words, whether we were still a happy family.

My next thought was about the video of the homeless woman who had been set on fire. And then, most of all, about how it got onto YouTube.

‘Is Mama coming?’ Michel asked.

‘Yeah.’

Maybe I was imagining things, but I thought I heard relief in his voice when he asked whether ‘Mama’ was coming. As though he’d been standing here with his father long enough. His father who couldn’t do anything for him anyway. Is Mama coming? Mama’s coming. I had to be quick. I had to look out for him, in the only department in which I could still look out for him.

‘Michel,’ I said, laying my hand on his forearm again. ‘What does Beau … Faso … How did Faso find out about that video? He had already gone home, right? I mean …’

Michel glanced at the entrance, as though hoping that his mother was already coming out to save him from this painful tête-à-tête with his father. I looked over at the door too. Something had changed, but I didn’t know right away what it was. The smoking man, I realized the next instant. The smoking man was gone.

‘Just did,’ Michel said.

Just did. The same two words he used to say when he had lost his coat, or left his book bag somewhere on a playground and we asked him how he could have done that. Just did … Just forgot. Just left it lying there.

‘I mailed those videos to Rick. And then Faso saw them too, he pulled them off of Rick’s computer. He put some of it on YouTube, and now he says he’s going to put the rest on there too if we don’t pay him.’

There were any number of questions I could have asked then: for a full second I asked myself which one other fathers would have asked.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Three thousand.’

I looked at him.

‘He wants to buy a scooter,’ he said.

28

‘Mama.’

Michel threw his arms around Claire’s neck and buried his face in her hair. ‘Mama,’ he said again.

Mama had come. I looked at my wife and at my son. I thought about the happy families. About how often I had looked at Michel and his mother – and how I had never tried to come between them; that, too, was a part of the happiness.

After she had caressed Michel’s back and the back of his head – over the black cap – Claire raised her eyes and looked at me.

How much do you know? that look asked.

Everything, I looked back.

Almost everything, I corrected myself then, thinking about Claire’s voicemail message to her son.

Claire took him by the shoulders and kissed his forehead.

‘What are you doing here, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were meeting someone.’

Michel’s eyes sought mine; Claire, I knew there and then, knew nothing about the videos. She knew a great deal more than I had thought, but about the videos she knew nothing.

‘He came to get some money,’ I said, keeping my eyes on Michel. Claire raised her eyebrows. ‘I borrowed some money from him. I was going to pay him back tonight, before we left for the restaurant, but I forgot.’

Michel lowered his eyes and scraped his feet on the gravel. My wife stared at me, but said nothing. I felt around in my inside pocket.

‘Fifty euros,’ I said; I pulled out the banknote and handed it to Michel.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said, stuffing the money in his coat pocket.

Claire breathed a deep sigh, then took Michel’s hand. ‘Weren’t you going to …’ She looked at me. ‘It would be better if we went back inside. They were wondering what was taking you so long.’

We hugged our son, Claire kissed him three more times on his cheeks, then we stood and watched as he cycled off along the path to the bridge. Halfway there it looked as though he were going to turn and wave, but he only raised one arm in the air.

After he had disappeared from view, through the bushes and across the canal, Claire asked: ‘How long have you known?’

I suppressed my initial urge to come back with ‘And what about you?’ Instead, I said: ‘Ever since Opsporing Verzocht.’

She took my hand, exactly as she had done with Michel just now.

‘Oh, honey,’ she said.

I turned slightly, so I could see her face.

‘And you?’ I asked.

Now my wife took my other hand as well. She looked at me and made a sorry attempt at a smile: it was a smile that, while knowing better, wanted to take us back in time.

‘I want you to know that I was thinking of you first and foremost, in all of it, Paul,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want … I thought maybe it would be too much for you. I was afraid … I was afraid it would make you go, all over again … well, you know.’

‘Since when?’ I asked quietly. ‘When did you find out?’

Claire squeezed my fingers.

‘On the night itself,’ she said. ‘The same night they were at the ATM machine.’

I stared at her.

‘Michel called me,’ Claire said. ‘It had just happened. He wanted to know what they should do.’

29

Back when I was still working, one day I stopped in the middle of a sentence about the Battle of Stalingrad and looked around the class.

All these heads, I thought. All these heads into which everything disappears.

‘Hitler had his sights set on Stalingrad,’ I said. ‘Even though, strategically speaking, it would have been wiser for him to press straight on to Moscow. But for him it was all about the name of the town: Stalingrad, the city that bore the name of his great opponent, Joseph Stalin. That city had to be conquered first. Because of the psychological impact that victory would have on Stalin.’

I paused and looked around the classroom again. Some of the students were writing down what I was telling them, others were looking at me; there were both interested and glassy gazes turned on me – more interested ones than glassy ones, I tried to tell myself, realizing at the same time that it no longer made much difference to me.

I thought about their lives, about all their lives that would just go on.

‘It’s on the basis of irrational considerations like that that wars are won,’ I said. ‘Or lost.’

Back when I was still working – it’s still hard for me to say that phrase out loud. I could go on here and explain that once, in a distant past, I’d had other plans for my life, but I’m not going to do that. Those other plans really existed, but precisely what they involved is nobody’s business. ‘Back when I was still working …’ at least appeals to me more than ‘When I was still standing before a class …’ or – the most horrible of all, the favourite phrase of the worst-of-the-worst, the former teachers who say of themselves that teaching is their blood – ‘Back when I was still in education …’

I would have preferred not to mention which subject I taught. That, too, is nobody’s business. It becomes a label so quickly. Oh, he’s a … teacher, people say. That explains a lot. But when you ask what it actually explains, they usually can’t tell you. I teach history. Taught history. These days, not any more. I stopped about ten years ago. Had to stop – although in my case I still believe that both ‘stopped’ and ‘had to stop’ are equally far from the truth. At equal and opposite ends of it, indeed, but the distance between them and the truth is almost the same.

It started in the train, the train to Berlin. The beginning of the end, let’s say: the start of (being forced into) stopping. Counting back, it seems the whole process took barely two or three months. Once it started, it was quick. Like someone who is diagnosed with a malignant illness and is gone six weeks later.

In retrospect, what I feel most is pleasure and relief; my days before a class had lasted long enough. I sat by myself at the window of my otherwise empty compartment and looked outside. The only thing that rolled by for the first half-hour were birch trees, but now we were moving through the outskirts of some town. I looked at the houses and the flats, the houses with their little gardens that often ran all the way up to the rail embankment. In one of those gardens white sheets were hanging out to dry, in another there was a swing. It was November and it was cold. There were no people in the gardens.

‘Maybe you should take a short vacation,’ Claire had said. ‘For a week or so.’ She had noticed something about me, she said: I reacted to everything too quickly and too irritatedly. It had to be the job, the school. ‘Sometimes I wonder how you keep it up,’ she said. ‘There’s really no reason for you to feel guilty.’ Michel was still only three, she could handle things easily enough, he went to daycare three days a week, she had those days all to herself.

I had thought about Rome and Barcelona, about palm trees and outdoor cafés, and finally decided on Berlin, mostly because I had never been there. At first I felt a certain cheerful excitement. I packed a small suitcase. I would take as little with me as possible: travelling light, I told myself. The excitement lasted until I got to the station, where the train to Berlin was waiting at the platform. The first part of the journey went smoothly. Without regret, I watched the housing blocks and industrial estates disappear. And when we got to the first cows, ditches and power masts, my thoughts were still fixed mostly on what lay ahead. On what was to come. But then the cheerfulness made way for something else. I thought about Claire and Michel. About the distance between us, which was growing all the time. I saw my wife at the door of the daycare centre, the child’s bicycle seat into which she lifted Michel, and then her hand sliding the key into the lock of our front door.

By the time the train crossed into German territory I had already been to the buffet a few times for more beer. But it was too late. I had passed a point beyond which there was no return.

It was then that I saw the houses and gardens. People are everywhere, I thought. There are so many of them that they build their houses all the way up to the railroad tracks.

From my hotel room, I called Claire. I tried to make my voice sound normal.

‘What’s wrong?’ Claire said right away. ‘Are you okay?’

‘How’s Michel?’

‘Good. He made an elephant out of clay at the daycare centre. But maybe he should tell you himself. Michel, this is Daddy on the phone …’

No, I tried to say. No.

‘Daddy …’

‘Hi, pal. What’s this I hear from Mama? Did you make an elephant?’

‘Daddy?’

I had to say something. But nothing came out.

‘Have you got a cold, Daddy?’

During the days that followed I did my best to play the part of the interested tourist. I strolled past the remnants of the Wall, I ate in restaurants where the guidebook I’d brought with me said only ordinary Berliners ate. The evenings were the worst. I stood at the window of my hotel room and looked at the traffic and the thousands of little lights and the people who all seemed to be on their way to something.

There were two possibilities for me to choose from: I could stay there at the window and watch, or I could go out and join the other people. I could pretend I was on my way to something too.

‘How was it?’ Claire asked a week later as I pressed her to me again. I pressed harder than I’d been planning to. But, on the other hand, not hard enough.

A few days later it started at school as well. At first I’d been able to tell myself that it had to do with being far away.

But something had happened, and that something I had now brought home with me.

‘You might ask yourself how many people there would be if the Second World War had not taken place at all,’ I said as I wrote the figure 55,000,000 on the board. ‘If everyone had been able to just go on fucking. I want you to do the arithmetic for me, for the next time we meet.’

I was aware that more students than usual were staring at me now, perhaps all of them: from the board to me and then back again. I grinned. I looked out the window. The school building had a central ventilation system. The windows didn’t open.

‘I’m going for a breath of fresh air,’ I said, and walked out of the classroom.

30

I don’t know whether some of the students had already complained at that point, whether parents brought it to the school board’s attention, or whether that happened only later. Whatever the case, one day I was summoned to the principal’s office.

The principal was the kind of man you rarely see these days: hair parted on the side, a brown herringbone suit.

‘I’ve been approached with some complaints about the content of the history lessons,’ he said after having me sit down in the only chair across from his desk.

‘By whom?’

The principal looked at me. On the wall behind his head hung a classroom map of the Netherlands, showing all thirteen provinces.

‘That’s not really relevant,’ he said. ‘The point is—’

‘It is relevant. Did those complaints come from parents or from the students themselves? Parents are always bitching about things that don’t bother the students.’

‘Paul, what this is really about is something you said about victims. Please correct me if I’m wrong. About victims of the Second World War.’

I leaned back, or at least I tried to lean back, but it was a hard, straight-backed chair that didn’t give.

‘It has been said that you have expressed yourself in rather belittling terms about those victims,’ the principal said. ‘You supposedly said that they had only themselves to blame for being victims.’

‘I never put it that way. I only said that not all victims are automatically innocent victims.’

The principal looked at a sheet of paper lying on his desk.

‘It says here …’ he began, but then he shook his head, took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. ‘You must realize, Paul, that these are indeed parents who have complained. Parents always complain. Tell me something I don’t know already about complaining parents. Usually it’s about nothing. About whether their children can get apples in the school cafeteria. What is our policy with regard to gymnastics during menstruation? Trifles. Rarely about the content of the lessons. But this time, that’s what it is. And that is not good for the school. It would be better for all of us if you would simply stick to the curriculum.’

For the first time during our meeting, I felt a slight tingling at the back of my neck. ‘And in what way have I allegedly not stuck to the curriculum?’ I asked calmly.

‘It says here …’ The principal fumbled anew at the paper lying on his desk. ‘But why don’t you tell me yourself? What exactly did you say, Paul?’

‘Nothing special. I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they’ve had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be – and not only you, but virtually the entire family – if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past – I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I only used it as an example because it’s the one that most appeals to their imaginations – and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes are also put on the list of innocent victims. That their names are also chiselled into the war memorials.’

I paused for a moment to catch my breath. How well did I know this principal, anyway? He had let me have my say without interruption, but what did that mean? Maybe he had heard enough. Maybe this was all he needed to give me a probationary warning.

‘Paul …’ he began; he had put his glasses back on, but he was not looking at me, he was looking at a point on his desktop. ‘Could I ask you a personal question, Paul?’

I didn’t reply.

‘Have you perhaps reached the end of your rope, Paul?’ the principal asked. ‘When it comes to teaching, I mean? Please understand me, I am not blaming you for anything, it happens to all of us at times, sooner or later. That we don’t feel like it any more. That we start thinking about the senselessness of our profession.’

I shrugged. ‘Oh, well …’ I said.

‘I’ve been through it too. When I was standing before a class myself. It’s a very nasty feeling. It knocks the blocks out from under everything. From under everything you’ve believed in. Is that the kind of thing you’re going through now, Paul? Can you still believe in it?’

‘I have always had the students in mind, first and foremost,’ I answered truthfully. ‘I’ve always tried to make the subject as interesting as possible for them. In doing that, I’ve always used myself as a measuring stick. I have never tried to woo them with wishy-washy, trendy stories. I’ve always thought of what I was like when I was in high school. What really interested me. That’s always been the bottom line for me.’

The principal smiled and leaned back in his office chair. He can lean back, I thought. And I’m sitting here with a straight back.

‘What I remember most about my own high-school history classes are the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans,’ I said. ‘Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, the Trojan Horse, the elephants marching across the Alps, the sea battles, the gladiatorial contests, the chariot races, the spectacular murders and suicides, the eruption of Vesuvius, but on the other hand also the beauty, the beauty of all those temples and arenas and amphitheatres, the frescoes, the baths, the mosaics, that’s the kind of beauty that lasts for ever, those are the colours that make us prefer a holiday on the Mediterranean to Manchester or Bremen, even today. But then Christianity comes along and it all begins to crumble and fall. In the end you’re actually glad when the barbarians come and level the whole thing. Those are the things I remember, as clearly as though I learned about them yesterday. And what I also remember most is that, after that, for a long time, there was nothing. The Middle Ages, when you come right down to it, were a disgusting, backward time during which, with the exception of a few violent sieges, very little happened. And then Dutch history! The Eighty Years War, I remember always hoping that the Spanish would finally win. There was a spark of hope when William of Orange was assassinated, but in the end that club of religious fanatics succeeded in seizing the day anyway. And darkness settled in for good across the Low Countries. I also remember how, year after year, our history teacher dangled the prospect of the Second World War in front of our noses, like a fat sausage. “I deal with the Second World War in the sixth form,” he said, but once you got to the sixth form he was still talking about William I and the Belgian secession. At best, he threw in a little bit of trench warfare to keep us interested. But, except for the mass destruction of human lives, the First World War was mostly boring. It had no zing, after a manner of speaking. There was no momentum. Later I was told that it’s always like that. You never get to the Second World War. You never get to the most interesting period in the last fifteen hundred years, even for the Netherlands where, after the Romans decided it was not their kind of place, nothing truly interesting happened until May 1940. I mean, when they talk about Holland in other countries, who do they talk about? About Rembrandt. About Vincent van Gogh. About painters. The only historical Dutch figure who ever had an international breakthrough, if you can put it that way, was Anne Frank.’

For what seemed the umpteenth time, the principal began shuffling papers around on his desk and flipping through something that looked vaguely familiar to me. It was a folder, a folder with a clear cover, the kind of folders students use when they hand in their papers.

‘Does the name […] mean anything to you, Paul?’ he asked.

He named one of the female students in my class. I’m not omitting the name here on purpose. I vowed at the time to forget it. And I succeeded.

I nodded.

‘And do you remember what you said to her?’

‘More or less,’ I said.

He closed the folder and laid it back on his desk.

‘You give her a three,’ he said, ‘and when she asks why, you say—’

‘That three was entirely fitting,’ I said. ‘It was complete garbage. Not the kind of thing I expect the students to hand in.’

The principal smiled, but it was a watery smile, a flaky smile, like curdled milk. ‘I have to admit that I am not particularly impressed either, but this is not about that. This is about—’

‘In addition to the Second World War, I also deal with a large part of the history that came afterwards,’ I interrupted again. ‘Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, the Middle East and Israel, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Palestinians. I deal with all of that during my classes. So then you can’t expect to turn in a paper about the state of Israel in which people mostly pick oranges and dance in sandals around a campfire. Cheerful, happy people everywhere, and all that horseshit about the desert where flowers blossom again. I mean, people are shot and killed there every day, buses are blown up. What’s this all about?’

‘She came in here crying, Paul.’

‘I’d cry too if I turned in garbage like that.’

The principal looked at me. I saw something in his eyes that I hadn’t seen there before: something neutral, or rather, something non-committal, as non-committal as his herringbone suit. He leaned back again, but further back than the first time.

He’s distancing himself, I thought. Not distancing himself, I corrected myself right away: he’s saying goodbye.

‘Paul, you simply can’t say things like that to a fifteen-year-old girl,’ he said. A more neutral tone had come into his voice as well. He was not going to enter into a discussion with me; he was delivering his judgement. I knew for certain that if I had asked him at that moment why you couldn’t say things like that, his reply would have been: ‘Because you can’t.’

For a brief moment, I thought about the girl. She had a sweet, but too-cheerful face. Cheerful for no good reason. A happy but sexless cheer was what it was, just as happy and sexless as the page and a half she had dedicated in her paper to the picking of oranges.

‘Things like that may be something you shout from the stands at a soccer match,’ the principal went on, ‘but not at a high school. At least, not at our school, and certainly not by a teacher.’

Exactly what I said to that girl doesn’t matter here, let me be clear about that. It would only distract us from the real issue. It would add nothing. Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.

I thought about her cheerful face. When I had said to her what I said, it broke down the middle. Like a vase. Or like a glass that shatters at a high-pitched note.

I looked at the principal and felt my hand curling into a fist. I couldn’t help it, I had no desire to continue with the discussion. What’s the phrase again … Our positions had become irreconcilable. That was what was happening. A chasm was yawning. Sometimes talk comes to an end.

I looked at the principal and imagined planting my fist right in the middle of that grey face of his. Just below the nose, the knuckles against that blank area between nostrils and upper lip. Teeth would break, blood would spurt from his nose, my position would be made clear. But I doubted whether that would help to resolve our differences. I wouldn’t have to stop after that first punch, of course, I could rebuild that bland face in its entirety, but at best into something equally bland. My position at school would become untenable, as they put it, although that was the least of my worries at that moment. In all frankness, my position had been untenable for a long time. From the very first day that I walked through the front door of this school, one could have spoken of an untenable position. The rest was a temporary reprieve. All the hours that I had stood in front of classes here: they had never been anything but a reprieve.

The question was whether I should do the principal the favour of giving him a beating. Whether I should make him a victim. Someone for whom people would feel pity later on. I pictured the students crowding to the window as he was taken away in the ambulance. Yes, an ambulance would have to be called; I would not stop before the job was finished. In the end, the students would feel pity for him.

‘Paul?’ the principal said, shifting his weight in his chair. He could smell something. He smelled danger. He was looking for a stance in which to roll with the first blow as well as he could.

And if the ambulance were to drive away without the lights flashing? I thought to myself. I took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. I had to decide quickly now, otherwise it would be too late. I could beat him to death. With my bare fists. It would be a dirty job, admittedly, but no dirtier than field-dressing a wild animal. Dressing a turkey, I corrected myself. He had a wife at home, I knew that, and some older children. Who knows, maybe I would be doing them a service. It was quite possible that they had grown tired of that bland face of his. At the funeral they would display their grief, but after that, in the entrance hall, relief would quickly gain the upper hand.

‘Paul?’

I looked at the principal. I smiled.

‘Could I ask you a personal question?’ he asked. ‘I thought, perhaps there’s something … I mean, I’m only asking. How are things at home, Paul? Is everything all right at home?’

At home. I kept smiling, but I was thinking about Michel the whole time. Michel was almost four. In the Netherlands, for beating to death a fellow human, you might receive eight years, I figured. It wasn’t much. With a little good behaviour, a little raking around the prison grounds, you would be out the gates within five. Michel would be nine by then.

‘How are things with your wife … with Carla?’

Claire, I corrected the principal soundlessly. Her name is Claire.

‘Wonderful,’ I said.

‘And the kids? How are they?’

The kids. Even that was too much for this asshole to remember! It was impossible to remember everything about everyone, of course. That the French teacher lived with her girlfriend was an exception. Because it stood out. But all the others? The others did not stand out. They all had a husband or a wife and children. Or no children. Or only one child. Michel’s bike still had training wheels. If I were in prison, I wouldn’t get to see the moment when the training wheels were taken off. Only hear about it.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it’s amazing how quickly it all goes. How quickly they grow up.’

The principal folded his hands and placed them on his desktop, ignorant of the fact that he had just crept through the eye of the needle.

For Michel. For Michel, I would keep my hands to myself.

‘Paul. You may not like my saying this, I know, but I have to say it anyway. I think it would be good if you made an appointment with Van Dieren. With the school psychologist. And if you were to take a short break from teaching, just for a while. So you can recharge your batteries. I think you need it. We all need it from time to time.’

I was remarkably calm. Calm and fatigued. There would be no violence. It was like a storm coming up: the café chairs are carried inside, the awnings are rolled up, but nothing happens. The storm passes over. And, at the same time, that’s too bad. After all, we would all rather see the roofs ripped from the houses, the trees uprooted and tossed through the air; documentaries about tornados, hurricanes and tsunamis have a soothing effect. Of course it’s terrible, we’ve all been taught to say that we think it’s terrible, but a world without disasters and violence – be it the violence of nature or that of muscle and blood – would be the truly unbearable thing.

The principal could go home later, undamaged. In the evening he would sit at the table with his wife and children. With his bland presence he would fill the chair that would otherwise have remained vacant. No one would be going to intensive care or to the funeral home, quite simply because it had just been decided that way.

Actually, I’d known from the very start. From the moment he started talking about home. How are things at home? It’s another way of saying that they want to get rid of you, that they’re going to dump you. It’s nobody’s business how things are at home. It’s like ‘Did you enjoy your meal?’ That’s nobody’s business either.

When I agreed without further ado to talk to the school psychologist, the principal looked genuinely surprised. Pleasantly surprised. No, I was not going to give him the slightest reason to push me aside without a struggle. I stood up, to indicate that, as far as I was concerned, our meeting was over.

At the door, I held out my hand. And he shook it. He shook the hand that could have added a new twist to his life – or ended it completely.

‘I’m glad you’re taking it so …’ he said; he didn’t finish his sentence. ‘And please give my warmest regards to … to your wife,’ he said.

‘To Carla,’ I said.

31

And so, a few days later, I went to the school psychologist. To Van Dieren. At home, I told the truth. I told Claire that I wanted to take things a bit easier for a while. I told her about the medication the psychologist had prescribed, by way of the family doctor. This was after a first appointment that had lasted barely thirty minutes.

‘And oh yeah,’ I said to Claire. ‘He advised me to wear sunglasses.’

‘Sunglasses?’

‘He said too many things were getting to me and that it might help to reduce the stimuli.’

I was keeping back only a small part of the truth, I reasoned. By keeping back only a small part, I could avoid having to tell a barefaced lie.

The psychologist had mentioned a name. A German-sounding name. It was the surname of the neurologist who’d had this particular disorder named after him.

‘With therapy, I can influence it a little,’ Van Dieren had said, looking at me earnestly, ‘but you should see it primarily as a neurological matter. With the right medication, it can be kept under control quite effectively.’

Then he had asked me whether, as far as I knew, there were other members of my family with a similar complaint or symptoms. I thought about my parents, then about my grandparents. I ran through the whole laundry list of uncles and aunts and cousins, trying to keep in mind what Van Dieren had said, namely, that the syndrome was often hard to detect: people tended to function normally, they were at most a little withdrawn, he said. In a social setting they were either the ones with the biggest mouths, or they said nothing at all.

At last, I shook my head. I couldn’t think of anyone.

‘But you asked about my family,’ I said. ‘Does that mean it’s hereditary?’

‘Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. We always try to take family histories into account. Do you have children?’

It took a moment for the full implications to sink in. Until that point I had been thinking only about where my genes had come from. Now, for the first time, I thought about Michel.

‘Mr Lohman?’

‘Just a moment.’

I thought about my son, who was almost four. About the floor of his bedroom, littered with toy cars. For the first time in my life I thought about the way he played with those cars. The next moment I wondered whether, from now on, I would ever be able to see it any differently.

And what about the daycare centre? Hadn’t they noticed anything at the daycare centre? I racked my brains, trying to remember whether anything had ever been said, a passing remark about Michel withdrawing from the group or displaying other aberrant behaviour – but I couldn’t come up with anything.

‘Is it taking you so long to figure out whether you have children?’ the psychologist asked with a smile.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just that …’

‘Maybe you’re thinking about having them.’

To this day, I’m sure I didn’t even blink when I answered.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Would you advise against it? In my case?’

Van Dieren leaned his elbows on the desk and folded his hands beneath his chin. ‘No. That is to say, these days, it’s quite possible to identify defects like that before birth. With a pregnancy test or amniocentesis. Of course, you have to be aware of what you’re getting into. Terminating a pregnancy is no trifling matter.’

A number of things flashed through my mind then. One by one, I held them up to the light. I could only deal with them one by one. I hadn’t lied when I answered the psychologist’s question by saying that we were thinking about having children. At most, I had omitted to say that we already had one. It had been a very trying birth. The first few years after Michel was born, Claire had refused to even consider getting pregnant again, but lately it had come up more often. We both realized that we would have to decide soon, otherwise the difference in age between Michel and a little brother or sister would be too great – if it wasn’t already.

‘So a test like that could show whether a child has inherited this disorder?’ I asked; my mouth was drier than it had been a few minutes earlier, I noticed, and I had to moisten my lips with the tip of my tongue before I could talk normally.

‘Well, I should probably correct myself there. What I just said was that the illness could be identified even in the amniotic fluid, but it’s not quite like that. At best, it’s the other way around. The amniocentesis can show that something’s not right, but precisely what is something only further testing can tell us.’

It had already become an illness, I noted. We had started with a defect and then, by way of a disorder and a syndrome, ended up with an illness.

‘But in any case, it’s reason enough for an abortion,’ I said. ‘Even without further testing?’

‘Listen. With Down’s Syndrome, for example, or what they call spina bifida, we can see clear signs in the amniotic fluid. In those cases we always advise the parents to terminate the pregnancy. With this illness, though, we find ourselves in a grey area. But we always warn the parents. In actual practice, most people decide not to run the risk.’

Van Dieren had started using the word ‘we’. As though he represented the entire medical profession. But he was only a plain old psychologist. And a school psychologist at that. That was about as low on the totem pole as you could get.

Had Claire ever had an amniotic fluid test? The stupid thing was, I didn’t know. I had gone along with her almost every time: to the first ultrasound, the first prenatal exercise class – only the first one, thank God; Claire had found it even more ridiculous than I did that the husband was expected to pant and puff along – the first visit to the midwife, which was also immediately the last visit. ‘I don’t want any midwives pawing me!’ she had said.

But Claire had also gone to the hospital alone a few times. There was no sense in me missing half a day’s work for a routine visit to her gynaecologist at the hospital, she had said.

I was about to ask Van Dieren whether all pregnant woman were given an amniotic fluid test, or only a particular high-risk group, but gulped back the question right away.

‘Were there amniotic fluid tests thirty or forty years ago?’ I asked instead.

The school psychologist thought about it for a moment. ‘I don’t believe so. No, now that you mention it. In fact, I’m a hundred per cent sure. That was definitely not something they did back then, no.’

We looked at each other; at that moment, I was also a hundred per cent sure that Van Dieren and I were thinking the same thing.

But he didn’t say it. He probably didn’t dare to say it, so I said it for him.

‘In other words, the inadequate state of medical science forty years ago is the only reason I’m sitting here across from you today?’ I said. ‘That I’m here at all,’ I added; it was a superfluous thing to add, but I felt like hearing it from my own mouth.

Van Dieren nodded slowly, a smile of amusement appeared on his face.

‘If you put it that way,’ he said. ‘Had this test been available back then, it’s not entirely unimaginable that your parents would have decided to be safe rather than sorry.’

32

I took the pills. For the first few days nothing happened. But I’d been told that beforehand: that nothing would happen, that the effects would become noticeable only after a couple of weeks. Still, it struck me that Claire had started looking at me differently from the very beginning.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, several times a day.

‘Fine,’ was my stock answer.

And it was actually true. I felt quite fine, I relished the change, above all I relished the fact that I didn’t have to get up in front of the classroom every day: all those faces looking at me, for a full hour, and then other faces that came in for the next hour, and on and on, one hour after the next; if you’ve never stood in front of a class, you don’t know what it’s like.

After a little less than a week, earlier than predicted, the medication began to take effect. I hadn’t expected it to be like that. I had been dreading it; I especially dreaded the thought that it would kick in without my noticing. Personality change, that was my biggest fear: that my personality would be affected, that I would become, though more bearable to those around me, lost to myself. I had read the information leaflets, and they included absolutely alarming contraindications. ‘Nausea’, ‘dry skin’ and a ‘decreased appetite’ were things you could live with, but they also talked about ‘feelings of fear’, ‘hyperventilation’ and ‘memory loss’.

‘This is really potent stuff,’ I told Claire. ‘I’m going to take it, I don’t have any choice, but I want you to promise that you’ll warn me if it goes wrong. If I start forgetting things or acting weird, you have to tell me. Then I’ll stop.’

But my fears proved unfounded. It was on a Sunday afternoon, about five days after I had gulped down the first pills, I was lying on the couch in the living room with the big, fat Saturday newspaper on my lap. Through the sliding glass doors I looked out at the garden, where it had just started to rain. It was one of those days of fluffy white clouds and patches of blue in between, the wind was blowing hard.

I should mention right away that in the months that went before all of this, my own house, my own living room, and along with it, above all, my own presence in that house and in that living room had often frightened me. The fear was directly connected to the existence of so many other people in similar houses and living rooms. Especially in the evening, after dark, when most people were ‘at home’, this fear would quickly take over. From where I lay on the couch I could see, through the bushes and trees, the light from windows across the street. I rarely saw actual people, but those lit windows betrayed their presence – just as my own lit window betrayed my presence. I don’t want to give the wrong impression, I wasn’t afraid of people themselves, of people as a species. I don’t suffer from panic attacks in big crowds, and I’m also not the antisocial guest at parties, the loner no one wants to talk to, whose body language itself announces nothing more loudly than his desire to be left alone. No, it’s something else. It had to do with the provisional status of all those people in their living rooms, in their houses, their housing blocks, their neatly laid-out neighbourhoods of streets, each of which directly leads to another, each square connected by streets to the next square.

That was how I sometimes lay on the couch in our living room in the evening and thought about things. Something in me whispered that I needed to stop thinking, that I should above all not go too far with thinking. But that never worked; I always thought things through to the end, to their most extreme consequence. At this exact moment, I thought, there are people everywhere, lying on couches in living rooms like this one. Later on they will go to bed, they’ll toss and turn a bit, or say something nice to each other, or remain stubbornly silent because they’ve just had an argument and neither of them wants to be the first to admit he was wrong. Then the light goes out. I thought about time, the passing of time, to be precise, how vast, how endless, how long and dark and empty one hour can be. Anyone who thinks like that has no need to think about the infinity of space. I thought about the sheer quantity of people, their numbers, not even in terms of overpopulation, or pollution, or whether in the future there would be enough for everyone to eat, but strictly about the quantity itself. About whether three million or six billion served any given purpose.

Once I had arrived at this point, the first feelings of discomfort would appear. It isn’t that there are too many people, not per se, I would think to myself, but there are an awful lot of them. I thought about the students in my classroom. They all had to do something: they had to make a start in life, they had to go through life. Even though a single hour can be so long. They had to find jobs and form couples. Children would come, and those children too would sit through history classes at school, although no longer taught by me. From a certain vantage point you could see only the presence of people, not the people themselves any more. That was when I would start to panic. From the outside, you wouldn’t have noticed much of anything, except that the newspaper was still lying unread on my lap.

‘Do you want a beer?’ Claire would ask, coming into the room just then with a glass of red wine in her hand.

Now I had to say ‘okay’, without the tone of my voice giving cause for concern. I was afraid my voice would sound like that of someone who has just woken up, who has just got out of bed and hasn’t spoken yet. Or simply a strange voice, not completely recognizable as my own, a scary voice.

Claire would raise her eyebrows and ask, ‘Is something wrong?’

And of course I would deny it, I would shake my head, but much too vehemently, which would give me away, as I, in a strange, scary, squeaky voice that didn’t sound at all like my own, would say: ‘No, everything’s fine. What could be wrong?’

And then? Then Claire would sit down beside me on the couch, she would take my hand, she might also lay a hand on my forehead, the way you do with a child when you’re checking for a temperature. And here it comes. I knew that the door to normal was wide open now: Claire would ask again whether there was really nothing wrong, and I would shake my head again (less vehemently this time); she would go on looking worried at first, but would soon put aside her concern: I was reacting normally, after all, my voice had stopped squeaking and I was answering her questions calmly. No, I had only been sort of lost in thought.

About what?

I don’t even remember any more.

Come on, do you know how long you’ve been sitting here with that newspaper on your lap? An hour and a half, maybe two!

I was thinking about the garden, that maybe we should build a little shed back there.

Paul …

Hmm?

No one thinks about the garden for an hour and a half.

No, of course not, I mean, I was thinking about the garden for the last fifteen minutes or so.

But what about before that?

On that Sunday afternoon, though, a week after my appointment with the school psychologist, I looked at the garden for the first time in a long time without thinking about anything. I heard Claire in the kitchen. She was singing quietly along to something on the radio, a song I didn’t know but in which the words ‘roses by day’ kept coming back.

‘What are you laughing about?’ she said when she came into the room a little later with two mugs of coffee.

‘Oh, just laughing,’ I said.

‘What do you mean, just laughing? You should see yourself. You look like one of those born-again Christians. One big lump of happiness.’

I looked at her, I felt warm, but in a pleasant way, the warmth of a down quilt. ‘I was just thinking …’ I said, but stopped quickly. I’d been planning to start in about a second child. We hadn’t touched on the subject for the last few months. I thought about the difference in age, which in the best case would be almost five years. It was now or never. Still, there was a voice telling me that this was not the time, in a few days perhaps, but not on this Sunday afternoon when the medication had started doing its work.

‘I was thinking that maybe we should build a little shed in the back garden,’ I said.

33

Looking back on it, that Sunday was the high point as well. The novelty of living a life without guarded thoughts quickly wore off. Life became more constant, more muted, like a party where you can see everyone talking and gesturing, but can’t hear what anyone in particular is saying. No more peaks and troughs. Something was missing. You sometimes hear about people who have lost their sense of smell and taste: for those people, a plate of the most delicious food means nothing at all. That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, otherwise I would die, but I had lost my appetite.

A few weeks later I made a final attempt to regain the euphoria of that first Sunday afternoon. Michel had just gone to bed. Claire and I were lying together on the couch, watching a programme about convicts on Death Row in the United States. We have a wide couch, with a little manoeuvring we could both fit on it. Because we were lying next to each other, I didn’t have to look her in the eye.

‘I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘If we were to have another child now, Michel would be five by the time it’s born.’

‘I was thinking the same thing, just recently,’ Claire said. ‘It really isn’t a good idea. We should just be happy with what we have.’

I felt my wife’s warmth, my arm around her shoulders may have pulled her closer for a moment. I thought about my talk with the school psychologist.

Did you ever actually have an amniotic fluid test?

I could ask that, as casually as possible. One disadvantage was that I couldn’t see her eyes at the moment I asked. A disadvantage, and an advantage.

Then I thought about our happiness. About our happy family. Our happy family that should be happy with what it had.

‘Shall we go somewhere next weekend?’ I said. ‘Hire a bungalow or something? You know, just the three of us?’

34

And then? Then Claire became ill. Claire, who was never ill, at least never had more than a runny nose, who in any case never spent the day in bed with flu, ended up in the hospital. From one day to the next: there was nothing that could have prepared us for her hospitalization, there had been no time to, as they say, make arrangements. In the morning she had felt a little ‘wobbly’, but she had gone out anyway, she had kissed me goodbye, on the lips, then climbed onto her bike. That afternoon I saw her again, but now with a whole series of drips in her arm and a monitor beeping at the head of her bed. She tried to smile, but it was clearly an effort. A surgeon standing in the corridor gestured to me to come over. He needed to talk to me alone.

I’m not going to say what was wrong with Claire, not here, I consider that a private matter. It’s nobody’s business what kind of illnesses you’ve had, in any case it’s up to her if she wants to talk about it, and not up to me. Let’s just say it wasn’t a life-threatening illness, at least not at that stage. That’s a word that was used a few times by friends and family and acquaintances and colleagues when they called. ‘Is it life-threatening?’ they asked. They said it slightly sotto voce, but you could hear the thirst for sensation right through it – when people get a chance to come close to death without having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity.

What I also remember well is the urge I felt to answer that question in the affirmative. ‘Yes, it’s life-threatening.’ I wanted to hear the silence that would drop at the other end after an answer like that.

So without going into detail about Claire’s illness, I just want to report here what the surgeon said to me in the corridor, after he told me about the coming operation. ‘No, it’s not peanuts,’ he said, having allowed a little pause for me to deal with the news. ‘Your whole life changes from one day to the next. But we do everything we can.’ The last phrase was said in an almost cheerful tone, a tone that clashed with the expression on his face.

And after that? After that, everything went wrong. Or rather, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. A second operation followed the first, then a third. More and more monitors were clustered around her bed, tubes emerged from her body and went back into it at other places. Tubes and monitors that were supposed to keep her alive, but after that first day the surgeon dropped his cheerful tone. He still kept saying that they were doing everything they could, but by then Claire had lost almost twenty kilos, she could no longer even raise herself up to lean against the pillows.

I was glad that Michel didn’t see her like that. At first I had acted chipper and suggested that we go together to see her at visiting hours, but he acted as though he hadn’t heard me. On the day itself, the day his mother had gone out the door but not come back in the evening, I had emphasized the festive aspect, the uniqueness of the situation, like sleeping over at a friend’s house or a field trip. We went out to eat together at the café-restaurant for regular people, spare-ribs with fries was his favourite meal back then, and I did my best to explain to him what had happened. I explained it to him and talked around it at the same time. I omitted things, mostly my own fears. After dinner we rented a movie at the video shop; he was allowed to stay up longer than normal, even though he had to go to school the next day (he was no longer at the daycare centre by then, he was in first grade at elementary school).

‘Is Mama coming later?’ he asked when I kissed him goodnight.

‘I’ll leave the door open a crack,’ I answered. ‘I’m going to watch TV, that way you can hear me.’

I didn’t call anyone that first evening. Claire had made me promise not to. ‘No reason to make a fuss,’ she’d said. ‘Maybe it will all turn out to be nothing and I can come home in a couple of days.’ I had already talked to the surgeon in the corridor by that time.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘No reason for a fuss.’

The next afternoon, after school, Michel didn’t ask about his mother. He asked me to take the training wheels off his bike. I had done that once a few months earlier, but then, after a few lurching attempts, he had ended up cycling into the low fence around the park. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. It was a lovely day in May and he went riding off, without wobbling even once, all the way to the corner and then back. When he passed me, he let go of the handlebars and raised his hands in the air.

‘They want to operate tomorrow,’ Claire told me that evening. ‘But what are they going to do, exactly? Did they tell you anything?’

‘Did I tell you that Michel had me take the training wheels off his bike today?’ I said.

Claire closed her eyes for a moment; her head was resting deep among the pillows, as though it were heavier than usual. ‘How’s he doing?’ she asked quietly. ‘Does he miss me terribly?’

‘He’s so anxious to come and see you,’ I lied. ‘But I think it would be better to wait a little bit.’

I’m not going to mention the name of the hospital where Claire was. It was fairly close to our home, I could get there by bike, or by car if the weather was bad, but either way it never took me more than ten minutes. During visiting hours Michel stayed with the woman next door, who had children as well; sometimes our babysitter came over, a fifteen-year-old girl who lived around the corner. I don’t feel like going into detail about everything that went wrong at the hospital, I would only like to urgently advise those who attach any value to life – their own, or that of their family and loved ones – to never let themselves be admitted there. That, by the same token, is my dilemma: it’s nobody’s business which hospital Claire was in, but at the same time I want to warn everyone to stay as far away from it as possible.

‘How are you coping?’ Claire asked one afternoon, I think it was after the second or third operation. Her voice was so weak that I had to put my ear almost to her lips. ‘Don’t you need any help?’

At the word ‘help’, a muscle or a nerve under my left eye began to twitch. No, I didn’t want any help, I could manage quite well by myself, or perhaps I should say: I amazed myself, above all, with how well I was able to manage. Michel got to school on time, his teeth brushed and his clothes clean. More or less clean: I was less critical of a few spots on his trousers than Claire would have been, but then I was his father. I’ve never tried to be ‘both father and mother’ to him, the way some half-assed, home-made-sweater-wearing head of a single-parent household put it once in some bullshit programme I saw on afternoon TV. I was busy, but busy in a good way. The last thing I needed was for people, with or without the best of intentions, to take work off my hands so that I would have more time for other things; I was grateful to have every moment accounted for.

Sometimes I would sit in the kitchen with a beer in the evening, after having kissed Michel goodnight, the dishwasher was zooming and bubbling, the newspaper lay unread on the table before me, and then suddenly I would feel uplifted, I don’t know how else to put it: it was a feeling of lightness, above all, extreme lightness; had someone pursed their lips and blown at me right then I would undoubtedly have gone floating off, up to the ceiling, like a down feather from a pillow. Yes, that was it: weightlessness, I’m deliberately not using words like happiness, or even satisfaction. I sometimes heard the parents of Michel’s playmates sigh about how, after a busy day, they really needed ‘a moment to themselves’. The children were in bed at last, and then came the magic moment, and not a minute earlier.

I’ve always thought that was strange, because for me that moment began much earlier. When Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be. My own voice, above all, asking him what he wanted in his sandwich, also sounded as it should have. The larder was full, I had done all the shopping that morning. I took care of myself as well, I looked in the mirror before leaving the house: I made sure my clothes were clean, that I had shaved, that my hair didn’t look like the hair of someone who never looks in the mirror – the people in the supermarket would have noticed nothing unusual, I was no divorced father reeking of alcohol, no father who couldn’t handle things. I clearly remember the goal I set for myself: I wanted to keep up the appearance of normality. As far as possible, everything had to remain the same for Michel as long as his mother wasn’t around. A hot meal every day, for a start. But also in other aspects of our temporary single-parent family, there shouldn’t be too many visible changes. Normally, it wasn’t my habit to shave every day; I didn’t mind walking around with stubble. Claire had never made a big deal out of that either, but during those weeks I shaved every morning. I felt that my son had a right to sit at the table with a clean-smelling, freshly shaven father. A freshly shaven and clean-smelling father would not prompt him to think the wrong things, would in any case not cause him to doubt the temporary character of our single-parent family.

No, on the outside there was nothing for anyone to notice about me. I remained one pillar of a trinity, another pillar was lying only temporarily (temporarily! temporarily! temporarily!) in the hospital, I was the pilot of a three-engine aircraft, one of whose engines had stalled: there is no reason to panic, this is not a crash landing, the pilot has thousands of flight hours behind him, he will land the plane safely on the ground.

35

One evening, Serge and Babette showed up. Claire was going to be operated on again the next day. I remember it well, that evening I had made macaroni, macaroni alla carbonara, to be honest the only dish I have ever mastered down to the smallest detail. Along with the spare-ribs from the café-restaurant for regular people, it was Michel’s favourite dish, which was why I made it every day during the weeks that Claire was in hospital.

I was just about to put the food on the table when the bell rang. Serge and Babette didn’t ask to come in; before I knew it they were already in the living room. I saw how Babette in particular looked around the room, then the whole house. During those weeks we didn’t eat in the kitchen, the way we usually did; I had set up trays in the living room, in front of the TV. Babette looked at the trays and cutlery and then at the television that was already on, because the weekly sports news was going to start in a few minutes. Then she looked at me, with a special look, I don’t know how else to describe it.

That special look, as I can still recall, made me feel as though I had something to explain. I mumbled something about the festive aspect of the meals we took together; there were, after all, occasions on which I did depart from the normal run of things, the household didn’t have to be a carbon copy of the way Claire ran it, as long as there were no visible traces of decline. I believe that in explaining this to Babette I used the phrase ‘male household’, and even ‘holiday feel’.

That was pretty stupid; looking back on it now I could kick myself. I didn’t owe anyone an explanation. But by then Babette had climbed the stairs and was standing in the doorway to Michel’s room. Michel was sitting on the floor amid his toys, he was in the process of lining up hundreds of dominoes, in imitation of World Domino Day, but when he saw his aunt he jumped up and leaped into her outstretched arms.

A little too enthusiastically, if you ask me. He was very fond of his aunt, it’s true, but the way he wrapped both arms around her thighs, making it look like he would never let go, still created the impression that he missed having a woman around the house. A mother. Babette cuddled him and ran her fingers through his hair. Meanwhile she looked around the room, and I looked with her.

The space on the floor was not fully occupied by dominoes. There were toys everywhere, toys had been slung all over the room, perhaps that’s more like it, there was almost no place to put a foot down. To say that Michel’s room was a mess would be an understatement, I saw that myself, now that I looked at it through Babette’s eyes. There was the explosion of toys, of course, but that wasn’t all. The two chairs, the couch and Michel’s bed were all covered in clothing, both clean and dirty clothing, and on his little desk and on the stool beside his (unmade) bed were plates with crumbs and half-empty glasses of milk and soda pop. Worst of all, perhaps, was the apple core that wasn’t on a plate at all, but lying on an Ajax football jersey with the name Kluivert on it. The apple core, like all apple cores exposed for more than a few minutes to sunlight and air, was a dark brown. I remembered having given Michel an apple and a glass of soda pop that very afternoon, but now you couldn’t tell that the apple core had been there for only a couple of hours, like all apple cores it looked as though it had been lying on top of that jersey for days, rotting away.

I also recalled having said to Michel that morning that later in the day we would clean up his room together. But for a variety of reasons, or rather, due to the comforting thought that there was plenty of time to clean up later on, it hadn’t happened.

As she stood there, still holding my son and running one hand affectionately over his back, I looked at Babette’s eyes and again I saw that special look. I’ll clean it up! I felt like screaming at her. If you had come by tomorrow, you could have eaten off the floor in this room. But I didn’t, I only looked at her and shrugged. It’s a bit of a mess, my shoulders said, but who cares? There are more important things to think about at the moment than a messy or tidy room.

Again, that need to explain! I didn’t want to explain, no explanations were needed, I told myself. They had dropped in without calling first. Let’s turn this around, I thought to myself, let’s turn this thing around and imagine what would happen if I suddenly showed up at my brother and sister-in-law’s door, while Babette was shaving her legs, for example, or while Serge was clipping his toenails. Then I would also see something that was essentially private, that normally wasn’t meant for the eyes of outsiders. I shouldn’t have let them in, I thought then. I should have said it was a bad moment.

On the way downstairs, after Babette had promised Michel that later, when he was finished, she would come back and watch the dominoes fall, and after I had told him that dinner was almost ready, that we were going to eat in a minute, we walked past the bathroom and the bedroom, Claire’s and my bedroom. Babette glanced at each of them quickly, she barely tried to disguise those glances, particularly at the overflowing laundry basket and the unmade bed strewn with newspapers. This time she didn’t look at me, though – and that was perhaps even more painful, more humiliating, than the special look. I had been very clear in saying to Michel, and only to Michel, that we were going to eat in a minute, I wanted to broadcast the unambiguous signal that my brother and his wife would not be invited to eat with us. They had come at a bad moment, and it was high time for them to leave.

Downstairs, in the living room, Serge was standing in front of the television with his hands in his pockets; the weekly sports news had already begun. More than anything else – more than the brazen way my brother stood there, hands in his pockets, his feet planted squarely on the carpet, as though it were his living room and not mine; more than my sister-in-law’s special looks at Michel’s room, at our room, at the laundry basket – it was the footage on the sports news, of a group of football players running laps around a sunny pitch, that told me now that my plan for the evening was about to fall to pieces; no, that it had already fallen to pieces. My evening together with Michel in front of the TV, our plates of macaroni alla carbonara on our laps, a normal evening, without his mother of course, without my wife, but a festive evening nonetheless.

‘Serge …’ Babette had walked over to my brother and laid her hand on his shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ Serge said, turned and looked at me without taking his hands out of his pockets. ‘Paul …’ he began. He stopped and looked helplessly at his wife.

Babette breathed a deep sigh. Then she took my hand and held it between her lovely, long and elegant fingers. She no longer had that special look in her eyes. Her gaze was friendly now, but resolute, as though I were no longer the initiator of the total chaos here in the house, but myself an overflowing laundry basket or unmade bed, a laundry basket that she, in no time, would empty into the washing machine, a bed she would make in the twinkling of an eye, neater than it had ever been before: a bed in a hotel, in the royal suite.

‘Paul,’ she said. ‘We know how hard this is for you. You and Michel. With Claire in the hospital and all. Of course we all hope for the best, but at this point no one knows how long this could take. And that’s why we thought that, for you, but also for Michel, it might be a good idea for him to come and stay with us for a while.’

I felt something, a white-hot rage, an ice-cold wave of panic. Whatever it was, it was probably written all over my face, because Babette squeezed my hand gently and said: ‘Take it easy, Paul. We’re only here to help.’

‘That’s right,’ Serge said. He took a step forward, for a moment it looked as though he was going to take hold of my other arm, or lay a hand on my shoulder, but decided against it.

‘You have enough on your mind with Claire,’ Babette said with a smile, as she started running a finger over the back of my hand. ‘If Michel could come with us for a little while, you’d be able to relax. And it would be a break for Michel too. He puts up a brave front, a child may not say some things out loud, but they really do notice everything.’

I took a few deep breaths, the most important thing now was not to let my voice waver.

‘I’d love to be able to invite the two of you to eat with us,’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid I wasn’t counting on visitors.’

Babette’s finger came to a halt on the back of my hand, the smile remained suspended on her face, but it was as though it had been disconnected from the emotion behind it – if there ever had been any emotion behind it. ‘We weren’t planning on eating with you, Paul,’ she said. ‘We just thought, with Claire being operated on tomorrow and all, that it would be best for Michel to come with us tonight—’

‘I was just about to sit down to dinner with my son,’ I said. ‘Your visit has come at a bad moment. So I’d like to ask the two of you to just leave now.’

‘Paul …’ Babette squeezed my hand, the smile had vanished now, replaced by something more entreating, a facial expression that didn’t suit her at all.

‘Paul,’ my brother echoed. ‘I’m sure you realize that these aren’t the most ideal conditions for a child of four.’

I yanked my hand out of Babette’s grasp. ‘What did you say?’ I asked. My voice didn’t waver at all, it sounded calm – too calm, probably.

‘Paul!’ Babette sounded alarmed, maybe she saw something I couldn’t see myself. Maybe she considered me capable of doing something rash, of doing something to Serge, but I would never have given him the satisfaction. True, the cold wave of panic had definitively given way to white-hot rage, but the fist I would have loved to plant squarely right in his noble face, so full of concern for me and my son, would have been decisive proof that I could no longer control my emotions. And a person who can’t control his emotions is not the most suitable person to run a (temporary) single-parent family. Within the last minute, I had heard my own first name repeated – how often? – five times. It’s my experience that when people go on repeating your first name, they want something from you, and it’s usually not something you want to give.

‘Serge is only trying to say that maybe it’s all a bit too much for you, Paul,’ – six times – ‘we, of all people, know that you’re doing your very best to make things seem as normal as possible for Michel. But it’s not normal. The situation isn’t normal. You need to be with Claire, and with your son. In a situation like that, you can’t expect anyone to run a normal household’ – her arm was raised, her hands and fingers pointed flutteringly upstairs: at the strewn toys, the laundry basket and the messy bed covered in newspapers – ‘right now, for Michel, his father is the most important thing he has. His mother is ill. He mustn’t get the impression that his father can’t handle things any more.’

I was just about to start cleaning up around the house, I wanted to say. If you two had come an hour later … But I didn’t say it. I wasn’t going to be put on the defensive. Michel and I clean up around the house when we damn well feel like it.

‘I really do have to ask the two of you to leave now,’ I said. ‘Michel and I were going to eat fifteen minutes ago. I attach a lot of importance to regularity in such things. In this situation,’ I added.

Babette sighed, for a moment I thought she was going to say ‘Paul …’ again, but she looked from me to Serge, and then back at me. From the television came the theme tune that announced the end of the weekly sports news, and suddenly I was overcome by a deep sadness. My brother and sister-in-law had come by at a bad moment, to stick their noses into the way I ran my household, but now something had happened that could never be undone. It seems like nonsense, it is nonsense, but the simple conclusion that my son and I would not watch the sports news that evening almost brought tears to my eyes.

I thought about Claire in her room in the hospital. For the last few days, thankfully, she’d had a room to herself; before that she had shared a room with some flatulent old cow who blew great rumbling farts. All through visiting hours the two of us did our best to pretend not to hear, but after a few days Claire had got so sick of it that every time the woman farted she began spraying aerosol deodorant around in the air. It made you feel like laughing and crying, all at the same time, but after visiting hours that day I went to the head nurse and insisted that Claire be given a room of her own. The new room looked out onto a side-wing of the hospital; when it was dark and the lights went on you could see the patients in that wing lying in their beds, wriggling up against their pillows to start in on the evening meal. We had agreed that tonight, the night before the operation, I would not come to visit, but would stay at home with Michel. Everything as normal as possible. But now I thought about Claire, about my wife alone in her room, about darkness falling and the view of the lit windows and the other patients, and I wondered whether we had done the right thing; maybe I should have called our babysitter so that this evening, on this of all evenings, I could be with my wife.

I resolved to call her as soon as I could, later on. Later on, after Serge and Babette had left and Michel had gone to bed. It really was time for them to bugger off, so that Michel and I could finally start our dinner together, our evening, which was now completely ruined anyway.

And then, suddenly, a new thought dawned. A nightmarish thought. A thought from which you awaken in a sweat, the quilt is lying on the floor, the pillow is soaked with your own perspiration, your heart is pounding – but there’s light coming through the bedroom window, it didn’t really happen, it was all just a dream.

‘Did the two of you visit Claire today, by any chance?’ I asked – I had adopted a friendly and nonchalant, a cheerful tone; whatever the cost, I had to keep them from seeing the kind of shape I was in.

Serge and Babette looked at me; the expressions on both their faces told me that my question had come as a surprise. But that didn’t mean anything, maybe they were surprised by the sudden mood swing; a few moments before, after all, I had been ordering them to leave.

‘No,’ Babette said. ‘I mean …’ Her eyes sought my brother’s for support. ‘I talked to her, though, this afternoon.’

So it really had happened. The unthinkable had actually happened. It was not a dream. The idea of taking Michel away from here had come from my own wife. She had talked to Babette on the phone that afternoon, and the idea had come up then. Maybe it hadn’t been Claire herself, maybe Babette had brought up the idea, but Claire, weakened perhaps by her condition, just to put an end to the harping, had agreed. Without talking to me about it first.

In that case I’m worse off than I figured, I thought. If my wife thinks it’s a good idea to make important decisions about our son without consulting me, I’ve probably given her reason to think so.

I should have tidied up Michel’s room, I thought. I should have emptied the laundry basket, the washing machine should have been running when Serge and Babette rang the bell, I should have put the newspapers on the bed into plastic bags, and the plastic bags should have been lined up in the hall, beside the front door, as though I were just about to take them out to the litter bin.

But it was too late for that. I realized that it would probably have been too late no matter what, that Serge and Babette had come by with a plan in mind; even if Michel and I had been sitting at the table in three-piece suits, with a damask tablecloth and sterling-silver cutlery, they would have come up with some other excuse to take my son away from me.

And did the two of you, this afternoon, happen to talk about Michel? I didn’t actually pose the question, I left it hanging in the air as it were. The silence I let fall gave Babette the chance to fill in the missing pieces.

‘Why doesn’t Michel ever go with you to the hospital?’ Babette asked.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Why doesn’t Michel ever go to visit his mother? How long has Claire been in there already? That’s not normal, a son who doesn’t want to see his mother.’

‘Claire and I have talked about that. She was the one who didn’t want him to, at first. She didn’t want Michel to see her like that.’

‘That was at first. But later. Later there must have been a moment, right? What I’m saying is that Claire herself doesn’t understand any more. She thinks her child has already forgotten her.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course Michel hasn’t forgotten his mother. He’s …’ I was going to say ‘He’s always talking about her,’ but that simply wasn’t true – ‘He just doesn’t want to see her. He doesn’t want to go to the hospital. I ask him often enough. “Shall we go to the hospital tomorrow and see Mama?” I say. And then he starts looking doubtful. “Maybe …” he says, and when I ask him again, the next day, he shakes his head. “Maybe tomorrow,” he says. I mean, I can’t force him, can I? No, that’s not it: I don’t want to force him. Not in this situation. I’m not going to drag him to the hospital against his will. It seems to me that that would be the wrong memory for him to have later on. I’m sure he has his reasons. He’s four, maybe he knows for himself the best way to deal with all this. If he wants to repress the fact that his mother is in the hospital, at this moment, then let him. That’s what I figure. It seems very grown-up to me. Grownup people repress everything too.’

Babette sniffed a few times and raised her eyebrows.

‘Isn’t that …?’ she said. And at the same moment I smelled it too. As soon as I spun around and ran for the kitchen, I could see the smoke hanging in the hallway.

‘Goddam it!’ As I turned off the gas under the macaroni and opened the door to the garden, I felt tears coming to my eyes. ‘Goddam it! Goddam it! Goddam it!’ I waved my arms, but the smoke only drifted around the kitchen without going away.

With moist eyes, I stared into the pan. I picked up the wooden spoon from the counter and tried to stir the hard, black goo.

‘Paul …’

The two of them were standing in the doorway. Serge with one foot in the kitchen, Babette with her hand on his shoulder.

‘Aw, look at that!’ I screamed. ‘Look at that, would you!’

I smacked the wooden spoon down on the counter. I was fighting against more tears, but it wasn’t really working.

‘Paul …’ My brother had put his other foot in the kitchen now, I saw a hand held out and ducked to one side.

‘Paul,’ he said. ‘It all makes a lot of sense. First your job, and now Claire. There’s no reason for you not to admit that to yourself.’

The way I remember it, there was an audible hiss when I grabbed the glowing handles of the pan and the skin on my fingers began to burn. I felt no pain, at least not at that point.

Babette screamed. Serge tried to duck, but the bottom edge of the pan hit him square in the face. He staggered back and, when I hit him the second time, he sort of fell against Babette. There was a cracking sound, and blood now as well: it spattered across the white tiles on the kitchen wall and the little jars in the spice rack beside the oven.

‘Daddy.’

By then Serge was sprawled on the kitchen floor, the area around his mouth and nose a mushy, bloody mess. I was already poised, pan in the air: ready to bring it down again against the mushiest, bloodiest part of his face.

Michel was standing in the doorway, he wasn’t looking at his uncle on the floor, but at me.

‘Michel,’ I said. I tried to smile, I let the pan drop. ‘Michel,’ I said again.

DESSERT

36

‘The blackberries are from our own garden,’ said the manager. ‘The parfait is made from home-made chocolate, and these are shaved almonds, mixed with grated walnuts.’

His little finger pointed to a few irregularities in the brown sauce, a sauce that in my opinion was much too thin – in any case thinner than what one thought of as a ‘parfait’ – and had leaked down between the blackberries to the bottom of the bowl.

I saw the way Babette looked at the bowl. At first only in disappointment – a disappointment that gave way over the course of the manager’s explanation to unadulterated disgust.

‘I don’t want this,’ she said when he had finished.

‘Excuse me?’ the manager said.

‘I don’t want this. Please take it back.’

I thought for a moment that she was going to push the bowl away, but instead she leaned far back in her chair, as though to establish the greatest possible distance between her and the washed-out dessert.

‘But this is what you ordered.’

For the first time since the manager had put the desserts down in front of us, she raised her head and looked at him. ‘I know this is what I ordered. But I don’t want it any more. I want you to take it away.’

Serge began to fidget with his napkin, he pressed one corner of it against the corner of his lips and wiped off a nonexistent something: meanwhile, he tried to catch his wife’s eye. Serge himself had chosen the dame blanche. Perhaps Babette’s behaviour embarrassed him; more likely, however, was that he couldn’t stand another delay. He had to eat his dessert now. My brother always chose the most ordinary desserts on the menu. Vanilla ice with whipped cream, crêpes with syrup, and that was about it. I sometimes thought it had to do with his blood sugar level, the same blood sugar level that left him high and dry in the middle of nowhere at the most inopportune moments. But it also had to do with his lack of imagination; as far as that went, the dame blanche was on the same level as the tournedos. In fact, I had been surprised to see such a straightforward dessert on the menu in this place.

‘These are the tastiest blackberries you’ll ever taste,’ the manager said.

‘Christ, man, take the bowl and fuck off with it!’ I said silently.

That was another thing. At any normal place – or, one should actually say, at any restaurant worth its salt anywhere in Europe, with the exception of Holland – waiters and managers didn’t even try to argue, following the motto: ‘Customer not satisfied? Back to the kitchen!’ Of course you had difficult customers everywhere, spoiled scum who wanted a blow-by-blow description of every dish on the menu, unbothered by any actual knowledge of food. ‘What’s the difference between tagliatelle and spaghetti?’ they’ll ask serenely. When it came to people like that a waiter had every right to slam his fist right into their inquisitive, spoiled mouths, knuckles hard against the front teeth, breaking them off close to the root. They should change the law, so that restaurant personnel could claim this as self-defence. Usually, though, it was the other way around. People were afraid to say anything. They excused themselves a thousand times over, even if they were only asking for the salt. Dark-brown green beans that tasted of licorice, stewed meat stuck together with rubbery nerves and chunks of cartilage, a cheese sandwich with stale bread and green spots on the cheese: without a word the Dutch diner grinds it all to a pulp between his teeth and swallows it down. And when the waiter comes by to ask if they are enjoying their meal, they run their tongues over the fibres and moulds stuck between their teeth and nod.

We had returned to our earlier seating arrangement, Babette to my left, across from Serge, and Claire right across from me. All I had to do was raise my eyes from my plate to look at her. Claire looked back and waggled her eyebrows.

‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter,’ Serge said. ‘I can handle those blackberries as well.’ He rubbed his stomach and grinned, first at the manager and then at his wife.

There was a full second of silence. A second during which I let my gaze descend to my plate; for the moment, it seemed wise to look at no one, and so I looked at my plate: at the three wedges of cheese, to be exact, that were still lying there untouched. The manager’s pinkie had hovered over each of the three pieces in turn, I had listened to the names that went with them without letting any of it register. The plate was no more than half the size of those on which the appetizer and main dishes had been served, yet again it was the emptiness that was most striking. The three little wedges had been arranged so they pointed at each other, probably to make the whole thing look like more than it really was.

I had ordered cheese because I don’t like sweet desserts: I never have, even as a child, but as I stared at the plate – mostly at the empty part of it – I was suddenly overcome by the kind of heavy fatigue I had been trying to put off all evening.

What I would have liked best was to go home. With Claire, or maybe even on my own. Yes, I would have paid a king’s ransom to be able to collapse on the couch at home. I can think better in a horizontal position, I would be able to think over this evening’s events, to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, as they say.

‘You keep out of it!’ Babette said to Serge. ‘Maybe we should get Tonio to come over, if it’s so hard to order another dessert.’

Tonio, I took it, was the man in the white turtleneck, the restaurant owner who had greeted them personally at the entrance, because he was so pleased to have people like the Lohmans among his clientele.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ the manager said quickly. ‘I can talk to Tonio myself, and I’m sure the kitchen will be able to offer you an alternative dessert.’

‘Darling …’ Serge said, but apparently had no idea of what to say next, because all he did was grin at the floor manager again and make a helpless gesture with both hands in the air, palms face up, as if to say, ‘Women? Go figure.’

‘What’s that stupid grin all about?’ Babette asked.

Serge lowered his hands, there was something pleading in the way he looked at Babette. ‘Darling …’ he said again.

Michel too had always disliked sweet desserts, I realized: as a child, when waiters tried to win him over by offering him ice cream or a lollipop, he had always shaken his head resolutely. We never tried to influence him, we would have let him have any dessert he liked, so you couldn’t blame it on his upbringing. It was hereditary. Yes, that was only word for it. If heredity existed, if anything was hereditary, then it had to be our shared aversion to sweet desserts.

At long last the manager took the bowl of blackberries from the table. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he mumbled, and hurried off.

‘Christ, what an asshole!’ Babette said; she wiped her hand angrily across the tablecloth, across the spot where her dessert had just been, as though trying to wipe away any traces the bowl of blackberries might have left there.

‘Babette, please,’ Serge begged, but there was genuine irritation in his voice now as well.

‘Did you see the look on his face?’ Babette said, reaching across the table to touch Claire’s hand. ‘Did you see how quickly he backed down when he heard his boss’s name? His master, ha ha!’

Claire laughed too, but not wholeheartedly, I saw.

‘Babette!’ Serge butted in. ‘Please! I think you’re way out of line. I mean, we come here a lot, we’ve never—’

‘Oh, is that what you’re afraid of?’ Babette interrupted him. ‘That next time you suddenly won’t get a table?’

Serge looked at me, but I looked away quickly. What did my brother know about heredity? All right, maybe when it came to his own children, his own flesh and blood. But what about Beau? When did you simply have to admit that something had apparently been inherited from someone else? From the biological parents who had remained behind in Africa? To what extent could Serge, for his part, distance himself from the actions of his adopted son?

‘I’m not afraid of anything,’ Serge said. ‘It just appals me when you go after someone in that patronizing tone of voice. That’s precisely the kind of people we’ve never wanted to be. That man is only doing his job.’

‘Who started with the patronizing tone?’ Babette said. ‘Huh? Who started it?’ Her voice had gone up a few decibels. I looked around; at the neighbouring tables, all heads were turned in our direction. This was, of course, extremely interesting, a woman raising her voice at the table of our future prime minister.

Serge also seemed aware of the looming danger. He leaned across the table. ‘Babette, please,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s stop. Let’s talk about this later.’

In all domestic arguments – as in all fist fights and armed conflicts, for that matter – there comes a moment when both or one of the parties can step back and prevent the situation from deteriorating any further. This was that moment. I wondered briefly what it was I was hoping for. As family and table-companions, it was our role to intervene, to speak words that would put things into perspective and so allow the parties to be reconciled.

But did I feel like doing that, to be frank? Did we feel like doing that? I looked at Claire, and at the same moment Claire looked at me. Playing around her lips was something outsiders would not have recognized as a smile, but which was in fact a smile. It was to be found in a quivering at the corners of her mouth, invisible to the naked eye. I knew that invisible quiver well. And I knew what it meant: Claire, too, felt absolutely no urge to referee. No more than I did. We were not going to do anything to intervene. On the contrary, we would do everything in our power to enable things to escalate even further. Because that suited us best at this moment.

I winked at my wife. And she winked back.

‘Babette, please …’ – it wasn’t Serge this time, it was Babette herself. She was imitating him, in an exaggeratedly affected tone, as though he were a snivelling child whining for ice cream. He’s got no reason to whine, I thought to myself, looking at the dame blanche on the table in front of him. He’s already got his ice cream. I almost burst out laughing. Claire must have read it on my face, because she shook her head as she winked at me again. Don’t start laughing now! her eyes said. That will ruin everything. Then we’ll be the ones to blame and the row will blow over.

‘You’re such a coward!’ Babette screamed. ‘You should be supporting me instead of thinking about your own image, about what it might look like. What other people might think about the fact that your wife finds her dessert too disgusting for words. What your little friend might think of you. Tonio! Tony or Anton is probably too common for him! It probably sounds too much like collard greens or split-pea soup!’ She threw her napkin on the table – too forcefully, because it hit her wineglass, which fell over. ‘I never want to come to this place again!’ Babette said. She had stopped screaming, but her voice still carried at least four tables away. People had put down their knives and forks. Their stares had already become less veiled. It would have been almost impossible for them not to stare. ‘I want to go home,’ Babette said, a bit more quietly now, already almost back to normal volume.

‘Babette,’ Claire said, holding out her hand. ‘Sweetheart …’

Claire’s timing was perfect. I grinned – in admiration of my wife. Red wine had spread across the tablecloth, most of it was seeping in Serge’s direction.

My brother got up from his chair. I thought at first that he was afraid of having wine dribble onto his trousers, but he pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘I’m sick and tired of this,’ he said.

All three of us looked at him. He had taken his napkin from his lap and laid it on the table. I saw that the ice cream in his dame blanche was beginning to melt, a thin trickle of vanilla had run over the top of the glass (the vase? the goblet? – what did you call that with a dame blanche?) and reached its base. ‘I’m leaving for a moment,’ he said. ‘I’m going outside.’

He took a step to one side, away from our table, then a step back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking first at Claire and then at me. ‘I’m sorry this had to happen. I hope that when I come back we can talk calmly about the things we need to talk about.’

I had actually expected Babette to start screaming again. Something like, ‘That’s right, walk away! Just walk away! Take the easy way out!’ But she said nothing – which, to be honest, I felt was too bad. It would have made the scandal more complete: a famous politician leaving the restaurant with his head bowed, while his wife shouts after him that he is an asshole, or a coward – even if it never made the newspapers, the story would spread like wildfire, from mouth to mouth, dozens, hundreds, who knows, maybe even thousands of potential voters would find out that regular guy Serge Lohman also had very regular marital problems. Like everyone else. Like us.

You might even wonder whether the fight between husband and wife, if it leaked out, would actually cost him votes, I realized now, or whether it would in fact attract more voters. A domestic quarrel might make him more human, his unhappy marriage would bring him closer to the electorate. I looked at the dame blanche. A second rivulet of ice cream had now passed the base of the glass and spilled onto the tablecloth.

‘The globe really is warming up,’ I said, pointing at my brother’s dessert; the best thing, I thought, was to say something light-hearted. ‘You see? It’s not just fashionable cant. It’s really true.’

‘Paul …’

Claire looked at me and rolled her eyes in Babette’s direction – following my wife’s gaze, I saw that Babette had started crying:

almost noiselessly at first, all you saw was the shaking of her back and shoulders, but soon enough the first sobs could be heard.

People at a few tables had stopped eating again. A man in a red shirt leaned over to an older woman (his mother?) and whispered something: Don’t look now, but that woman is crying – it had to be something like that – that’s Serge Lohman’s wife …

Meanwhile, Serge still hadn’t left; he was standing there with his hands on the back of the chair, as though, with his wife crying like this, he couldn’t decide whether to suit the action to the word.

‘Serge,’ Claire said without looking at him – without even raising her head, ‘sit down.’ She turned to me, ‘Paul.’ Claire had taken my hand; she tugged on it, and it took a moment before I realized what she was saying: she wanted me to get up, so that we could change places and she could sit beside Babette.

We stood up at the same time. While we were shuffling past each other, Claire grabbed my hand again; her fingers wrapped firmly around my wrist and she gave it a little yank. Our faces were no more than a few inches apart, I’m not much taller than my wife, all I would have had to do was bow my head in order to bury my face in her hair – something I felt more of a need to do at that moment than anything else.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ Claire murmured.

I said nothing, only nodded faintly.

‘With your brother,’ Claire said.

I waited to see if she would say anything else, but she seemed to feel that we had been standing beside the table long enough;

she edged past me and sat down in my chair, beside the weeping Babette.

‘How are things here?’

I turned around and looked into the face of the man in the white turtleneck. Tonio! Serge had slid back his chair and was still busy seating himself again, so the restaurant owner had probably decided to address me first. Whatever the case, it was not merely the difference in our heights – he was a whole head shorter than me – that made me feel he was grovelling; he stood slightly bent over, his hands clasped in front of him, head turned to one side, which left him looking at me obliquely and from below: lower than necessary.

‘I heard there were problems with the choice of desserts,’ he said. ‘We’d like to offer you an alternative dessert of your choice.’

‘The dessert of the house?’ I asked.

‘Excuse me?’

The restaurateur was almost bald, the few grey hairs left around his ears had been coiffed with care, his slightly too-tanned head stuck out of the white neck of his sweater like a tortoise from its shell.

It had occurred to me earlier, when Serge and Babette came in, that he reminded me of something or someone, and now I suddenly knew what it was. Years ago, a few doors down from us, there had lived a man with this same servile air. He was perhaps even smaller than ‘Tonio’, and he had no wife. One evening, Michel, who was about eight at the time, had come home with a pile of LPs and asked whether we still had a turntable somewhere.

‘Where did you get the records?’ I asked.

‘From Mr Breedveld,’ Michel had said. ‘He’s got at least five hundred of them, man! And I get to keep these.’

It took a moment before I connected the name ‘Breedveld’ to the little single man living a few doors down. They went to his house all the time, Michel told me, a whole bunch of small boys from the neighbourhood, to listen to Mr Breedveld’s old albums.

I remember quite well how my temples began pounding, first in fear, then in rage. Trying to keep my voice as normal as possible, I asked Michel what Mr Breedveld did while the boys were listening to records.

‘Oh, you know. We sit on the couch. He always has peanuts and chips and cola.’

That evening, after dark, I rang Mr Breedveld’s bell. I didn’t ask whether I could come in, I pushed him aside and walked right through to his living room. The curtains, I noted, were already drawn.

Mr Breedveld moved away a few weeks later. The final picture in my mind from that time is of the neighbourhood children rummaging through boxes of shattered LPs, to see whether there were any left intact. Mr Breedveld had put the boxes out on the kerb in front of his house the day before he moved.

I looked at ‘Tonio’, and clenched the arm of the chair with one hand.

‘Get the fuck out of here, you pervert!’ I said. ‘Fuck off, before things really get out of hand.’

37

Serge cleared his throat, placed his elbows on either side of his dame blanche, and formed a tent with his fingers.

‘We all know by now what happened,’ he said. ‘All four of us are familiar with the facts.’ He looked at Claire, then at Babette, who had stopped crying but was still pressing a corner of her napkin to her cheek – just below her eye, behind the tinted lens of her glasses. ‘Paul?’ He turned his head and looked at me: his look was one of concern, but I wondered whether it was the concern of the man or the concern of the politician Serge Lohman.

‘Yes, what is it?’ I said.

‘I take it you are also aware of all the facts?’

All the facts. I couldn’t help smiling: then I looked at Claire, and wiped the smile off my face. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Although it depends on what you mean by facts.’

‘I’ll get to that later. What matters is how we deal with this. How we bring it all out into the open.’

At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. I looked back at Claire. We’ve got a problem, that’s what she’d said. This is the problem, her eyes were saying now.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said.

‘Paul.’ Serge laid his hand on my forearm. ‘Give me a chance to finish. Then it will be your turn. When I’m done.’

The diners at the neighbouring tables had gone back to their dining, but things were restless around the open kitchen. I saw three waitresses standing around ‘Tonio’ and the manager, they didn’t look once in our direction, but I would have bet my cheese platter that they were talking about us – about me, I corrected myself.

‘Babette and I spoke with Rick this afternoon,’ Serge said. ‘Our impression is that Rick is suffering badly from all this. He thinks it’s terrible, what the two of them did. It keeps him awake at night, quite literally. He looks distraught. It’s affecting his academic achievements.’

I wanted to say something, but restrained myself. It was something in Serge’s tone: as though, even at this early stage, he was trying to compare his son favourably to ours. Rick couldn’t sleep. Rick looked distraught. Rick thought it was terrible. It felt as though Claire and I had to defend Michel – but what were we supposed to say? That Michel thought it was terrible too? That he slept even less than Rick?

It simply wasn’t true, I realized. Michel had other things on his mind besides the incinerated homeless woman in the ATM cubicle. And what was all this moaning about academic achievements? It was too disgusting for words, if you thought about it.

If Claire said something, I would side with her, I decided. If Claire said that it was inappropriate, in view of what had happened, to be talking about academic achievements, I’d chime in and say that we wanted to leave Michel’s schoolwork out of this.

Was Michel’s schoolwork being affected? I asked myself the next instant. I didn’t have that impression. As far as that went, he had his feet more firmly on the ground than his cousin.

‘What’s more, from the very start I have tried to see this separately from my own political future,’ Serge went on. ‘Which is not to say that I’ve never thought about that.’

From the looks of things, Babette had started crying again. Noiselessly. I got the sneaky feeling that I was present at something at which I would rather not be present. It made me think of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Of Oprah Winfrey.

Was that the way it would go? Was this the dress rehearsal for the press conference at which Serge Lohman would announce that the boy on camera in Opsporing Verzocht was his son, but that he hoped nonetheless to retain the trust the voters had showed in him? He couldn’t be that naive, could he?

‘To me, the most important thing is Rick’s future,’ Serge said. ‘Of course, it’s very possible that this whole thing will never be solved. But could you live with that? Can Rick live with that? Can we live with that?’ He looked at Claire first, then at me. ‘Can the two of you live with that?’ he asked. ‘I can’t,’ he added then, without waiting for us to answer. ‘I can just see myself, standing on the palace stairs with the Queen and the cabinet ministers. Knowing that, at any moment, at any old press conference, a journalist might raise his finger and ask: “Mr Lohman, is there any truth to the rumour that your son was involved in the murder of a homeless woman?”’

‘Murder?’ Claire cried out. ‘So it’s murder now, is it? Where did you get that from all of a sudden?’

A brief silence fell; the word ‘murder’ must have been audible four tables away. Serge looked over his shoulder, then back at Claire.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That was too loud. But that’s not the point. To call it “murder”, I find that taking things a step too far. What am I saying? Ten steps too far!’

I looked at my wife in admiration. Anger made her prettier, especially her eyes; it was a look that put men to shame. Other men.

‘So what would you call it, Claire?’ Serge had picked up his dessert spoon and was stirring it around in his melted ice cream. It was one of those spoons with a very long handle, but he still managed to get ice and whipped cream on his fingers.

‘An accident,’ Claire said. ‘An unfortunate series of events. No one in his right mind would even begin to claim that they went out that evening to murder a homeless woman.’

‘But that’s what the security camera shows. That’s what all of Holland saw. I mean, so don’t call it murder, call it manslaughter as far as I’m concerned, but that woman never raises a finger against them. That woman gets a lamp and a chair and finally a jerrycan thrown in her face.’

‘What was she doing in that ATM cubicle?’

‘That doesn’t matter, does it? There are homeless people everywhere. Unfortunately. They sleep wherever they can keep a bit warm. It was probably warm and dry in there.’

‘But she was lying in the way, Serge. I mean, she could have gone and slept in the hall at your house. It’s probably warm and dry there, too.’

‘Let’s try to stick to the point,’ Babette said. ‘I really don’t think that—’

‘This is the point, sweetheart.’ Claire had put her hand on Babette’s forearm. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me, but when I hear Serge talking like this, it sounds like we’re dealing with some poor little bird here, a fledgling that has fallen out of its nest. What we’re talking about is a full-grown person. A grown-up woman who, in complete possession of her senses, goes to sleep in an ATM cubicle. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m only trying to put myself in someone else’s shoes. Not the homeless woman’s, but Michel and Rick’s. They’re not drunk, they’re not on drugs. They just want to withdraw some money. But someone is lying in the ATM cubicle, stinking to high heaven. So isn’t your first reaction: oh yuck, fuck off, would you?’

‘But they could have gone somewhere else for their money, right?’

‘Somewhere else?’ Claire started laughing. ‘Somewhere else? Yes, of course. You can always go out of your way to avoid things. I mean, what would you do, Serge? You open the front door of your house and you have to step over a sleeping vagrant. What would you do? Would you just turn around and go back inside? Or suppose someone was standing there pissing against your door. Would you just close the door? Would you pack up and move to another house?’

‘Claire—’ Babette said.

‘Okay, all right,’ Serge said. ‘I see what you’re getting at. That wasn’t what I was trying to say. Of course we shouldn’t walk away from problems or difficult situations. But you can, you have to, try to find solutions to problems. To …’ – here he hesitated for a moment – ‘… take the life of a homeless person doesn’t bring you any closer to the solution.’

‘Jesus, Serge!’ Claire said. ‘I’m not talking about a solution to the problem of the homeless. I’m talking about one homeless person. And more than that one homeless person, I think we should be talking about Rick and Michel. I’m not going to deny what happened. I’m not trying to say there was nothing wrong with it. But we have to keep it in perspective. It’s an incident. An incident that can have a major impact on our children’s lives, on their future.’

Serge sighed and rested his hands on the table, on either side of his dessert; he was trying to make eye contact with Babette, I saw, but she had her purse in her lap and was looking for something – or pretending to.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘That future. That’s precisely what I wanted to talk about. Don’t get me wrong, Claire, I’m just as concerned about our boys’ futures as you are. The only thing is, I don’t believe they can live with it, with a secret like that. In the long run it’s going to tear them apart. Rick, in any case, is being torn apart already’ – he sighed again – ‘it’s tearing me apart.’

Once again, I had the feeling I was witnessing something that only obliquely had anything to do with reality. At least with our reality, the reality of two couples – two brothers and their wives – who had gone out to dinner together to talk about their children’s problems.

‘I’ve made up my own mind about my son’s future,’ Serge said. ‘Later, when this is all behind us, I want him to be able to go on with his life. Let me emphasize that I’ve made this decision on my own. My wife … Babette …’ Babette had fished a pack of Marlboro Lights from her purse, an unopened pack, and was now tearing off the cellophane wrapper. ‘Babette doesn’t agree with me. But my mind is made up. She only heard that this afternoon.’

He took a deep breath. Then he looked at us in turn. Only then did I notice the moist glistening in his eyes.

‘In the best interests of my child, and also in the best interests of this country, I’m going to withdraw my candidacy,’ he said.

Babette had put a cigarette between her lips, but now she removed it. She looked at Claire and me.

‘Dear Claire,’ she said. ‘Dear Paul … the two of you have to say something. Please tell him he can’t do this. Tell him he’s out of his mind.’

38

‘You can’t do that,’ Claire said.

‘He can’t, can he?’ Babette said. ‘You see, Serge? What do you think, Paul? Don’t you think it’s a ridiculous idea? There’s no reason to do that, is there?’

To me, personally, it seemed like an excellent idea for my brother to put an end to his political career, right here and now; it would be the best thing for everyone – for all of us, for the country – the country would be spared a four-year Serge Lohman administration: four costly years. I thought about the unthinkable, about things I had mostly been able to suppress: Serge Lohman standing beside the Queen on the steps of the royal palace, posing for the official photo with his newly formed cabinet; with George Bush in an easy chair in front of a fireplace; with Putin on a boat on the Volga … ‘After the conclusion of the European summit, Prime Minister Lohman raised a toast to success with the French president …’

First of all, it was the sense of vicarious embarrassment, the unbearable thought that government leaders all around the world would become acquainted with my brother’s vacuous presence. How, even in the White House and at the Elysée Palace, he would wolf down his tournedos in three bites because he had to eat now. The meaningful looks the government leaders would exchange. ‘He’s from Holland,’ they would say – or perhaps only think to themselves, which was even worse. That sense of vicarious shame was a constant. Our being ashamed of our prime ministers was the only feeling that created a seamless connection between one Dutch administration and the next.

‘Maybe he should take some time to think through it carefully again,’ I said to Babette with a shrug.

The most terrrible image of all was that of Serge sitting at our dinner table at home, somewhere in the – until recently – near future, but a future that was now thankfully fading fast, telling stories about his meetings with the world’s rulers. They would be lame stories, stories brimming over with platitudes. Claire and I would be able to see through them. But Michel? Whether he liked it or not, my son would be fascinated by the anecdotes, the corners of the veil that my brother would lift to his own honour and glory, the behind-the-scenes views of international affairs with which he would justify his presence at our table. ‘What are you griping about, Paul? Your son finds it interesting, you can see that, can’t you?’

My son. Michel. I had thought about a future, without stopping to ask myself if there would be one.

‘Think it through carefully?’ Babette said. ‘That’s exactly it. If only he would stop sometimes and think things through!’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ Claire said. ‘I mean that Serge isn’t free to simply decide this on his own.’

‘I’m his wife!’ Babette said, and she began sobbing again.

‘That’s not what I mean either, Babette,’ Claire said, looking at Serge. ‘I mean that all of us have a stake in this. We’re all in this together. All four of us.’

‘That’s why I wanted us to meet,’ Serge said. ‘So we could talk together about how we’re going to do it.’

‘How we’re going to do what?’ Claire said.

‘How we’re going to bring it out into the open. In a way that will give our children a fair chance.’

‘But you’re not giving them a chance, Serge. What you’re planning to bring out into the open is that you’re withdrawing from politics. That you don’t want to be the prime minister any more. Because you can’t live with it, that’s what you said.’

‘Can you live with it?’

‘It’s not about whether I can live with it. It’s about Michel. Michel has to be able to live with it.’

‘And can he?’

‘Serge, don’t be obtuse. You make a decision. With that decision, you also decide your son’s future. That’s up to you. Although I wonder whether you realize what kind of damage you’re going to cause. But your decision will also destroy the future of my son.’

My son. Claire had said my son, she could have glanced over at me then, for support, even if only for a knowing look, then recouped and said our son – but she didn’t; she didn’t even look my way, she kept her eyes fixed on Serge.

‘Oh, come on, Claire,’ my brother said. ‘That future has already been ruined. Whatever happens. That has nothing more to do now with what I decide or don’t decide.’

‘No, Serge. That future will be ruined only if you give in to your urge to play the noble politician. Just because you can’t live with something, you assume that that applies to my son as well. Maybe you’ll be able to make it up to Rick; I hope for your sake that you can explain to your son what you’re about to do to his life, but please leave Michel out of it.’

‘How can I leave Michel out of it, Claire? How am I supposed to do that? Explain that to me first. I mean, they were both there, if I remember correctly. Or are you trying to deny that, too?’ He fell silent for a moment, as though shocked by his own, uncompleted thought. ‘Is that what you’re trying to do?’ he asked.

‘Serge, try to be realistic. There is nothing happening. No one has been arrested. There isn’t even any suspicion. We’re the only ones who know what happened. It’s just not enough to justify sacrificing the future of two fifteen-year-old boys. And I’m not even talking now about your own future. You have to do whatever you think you have to do. But you can’t go dragging other people into it. Especially not your own child. Let alone mine. You present it as an act of pure self-sacrifice: Serge Lohman, the ambitious politician, our next prime minister, gives up his political career because he can’t live with a secret like this. In fact, he doesn’t mean a secret, he means a scandal. It all seems entirely noble, but in fact it’s purely egocentric.’

‘Claire—’ Babette said.

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Serge said, silencing his wife with a gesture. ‘Let me finish, I’m not done yet.’ He turned to Claire again. ‘Is it egocentric to give your son a fair chance? Is it egocentric of a father to give up his own future for his son’s future? You have to at least explain to me what’s egocentric about that.’

‘And what does a future like that consist of? What is he supposed to do with a future in which his father puts him up on trial? How will his father explain to him that it was this same father’s doing that put him behind bars?’

‘But that’s maybe only for a couple of years. That’s all you get for manslaughter in this country. I’m not denying that it will be hard, but after a couple of years they will have served their sentences and can try to carefully pick up their lives again and move on. I mean, what else do you propose, Claire?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing.’ Serge repeated the word as a neutral conclusion, not a question.

‘Things like this blow over. You can see it happening already. People say it’s a disgrace. But in the end, they want to get on with their own lives. In two or three months, no one will be talking about it any more.’

‘I’m referring to something else, Claire. I … we notice that it’s starting to tear Rick apart. People may forget it, but he won’t.’

‘But we can help them with that, Serge. With that forgetting. I’m only saying that you shouldn’t rush decisions like this. In a few months, maybe even a few weeks, everything may have changed. We can discuss it calmly then. We. The four of us. With Rick. With Michel.’

With Beau, I felt like adding, but held myself back.

‘I’m afraid that’s not on,’ Serge said.

In the silence that followed, the only thing you could hear was Babette’s quiet sobbing.

‘Tomorrow there is going to be a press conference, where I’ll announce that I’m stepping down,’ Serge said. ‘Tomorrow at noon. It’s going to be broadcast live. The twelve o’clock news is going to lead with it.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Oh, is it already that late?’ he said, seemingly indifferent to whether this sounded natural or not. ‘I have to … I’ve got another appointment,’ he said. ‘In a little bit. In half an hour.’

‘An appointment?’ Claire said. ‘But we have to – who are you meeting?’

‘The director wants to confirm the location for my press conference, and run through a few things beforehand. It didn’t seem to me like a good idea to do something like this in The Hague, a press conference like this. That’s never really been my kind of thing. So I was thinking of some place less formal …’

‘Where?’ Claire said. ‘Not here, I hope?’

‘No. You know that café that serves meals across the street, where you took us a few months ago? We ate there too. The—’ Here he pretended to be searching for the name of the café; then he named it. ‘When I was trying to think of a suitable place, it suddenly came into my mind. An ordinary café. Ordinary people. I can be myself there, more than in some frigid press centre. I suggested to Paul that we have a beer there tonight before coming here, but he didn’t feel like it.’

39

‘Could I interest you in coffee?’

The manager had popped up out of nowhere beside our table, he had his hands tucked behind his back and was leaning over slightly; his eyes were caught for a moment by Serge’s collapsed dame blanche, then he looked at each of us enquiringly, in turn.

I might have been mistaken, but I thought I noted a certain briskness in the manager’s movements and facial expression. That’s how things often go in restaurants like this: as soon as you’ve finished your meal and there is no longer any real chance of you ordering another bottle of wine, you might as well get lost.

Even if you were going to be the new prime minister in seven months’ time, I thought. There was a time to come and a time to go.

Serge checked his watch again.

‘Well, I think …’ He looked first at Babette, then at Claire. ‘Why don’t we order a cup of coffee at the café?’ he said.

Ex, I corrected myself. Ex-prime minister. Or no … what did you call someone who had never been prime minister, but decided not to run anyway? Ex-candidate?

The prefix ‘ex’, in any case, didn’t sound good. Ex-footballers and ex-cyclists know what that’s like. It was doubtful whether my brother, after tomorrow’s press conference, would still be able to reserve a table at this restaurant. On the same day. It seemed more likely that an ex-candidate would be put on the waiting list for three months, at the very least.

‘Then would you bring us the check?’ Serge said. Maybe I’d missed something, but I couldn’t remember his having waited to see whether Babette and Claire also thought it was a better idea to move to the café.

‘I’d like coffee,’ I said. ‘An espresso,’ I added. ‘And something to go with it.’ I thought about it for a moment, I’d been moderate throughout the evening, I just didn’t know right away what I felt like drinking.

‘I’ll have an espresso as well,’ Claire said. ‘And a grappa.’

My wife. I felt a warmth, I wished I was sitting beside her and could touch her now. ‘A grappa for me too,’ I said.

‘And you, sir?’ The manager seemed a bit confused at first, and looked at my brother. But Serge shook his head.

‘Just the check,’ he said. ‘My wife and I … we have to …’ He glanced over at his wife – a panicky glance, I could see that even from this angle. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Babette had then ordered an espresso as well.

But Babette had stopped blubbering, she dabbed at her nose with the tip of her napkin. ‘Nothing for me, thank you,’ she said without looking at the manager.

‘So that will be two espressos and two grappas,’ he said. ‘Which grappa would you like? We have seven kinds, from old wood-ripened to young—’

‘The ordinary one,’ Claire interrupted him. ‘The clear one.’

The manager gave a bow barely visible to the naked eye. ‘A young grappa for the lady,’ he said. ‘And what would you like, sir?’

‘The same,’ I said.

‘And the check,’ Serge repeated.

After the manager had hurried away, Babette turned to me – with an attempt at a smile. ‘And you, Paul? We haven’t heard from you at all. What do you think?’

‘I think it’s ridiculous that Serge has picked our café for this,’ I said.

The smile, or at least the attempt at one, disappeared from Babette’s face.

‘Paul, please,’ Serge said. He looked at Claire.

‘Yeah, I think it’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘We took the two of you to that café. It’s a place where Claire and I go all the time, for the daily special. You can’t just walk in there and hold a press conference.’

‘Paul,’ Serge said. ‘I don’t know whether you realize how serious—’

‘Let him finish,’ Babette said.

‘I was finished,’ I said. ‘Anyone who doesn’t understand something like that, I can’t explain it to him.’

‘We thought it was a nice café, too,’ Babette said. ‘We have only pleasant memories of that evening.’

‘Spare-ribs!’ Serge said.

I waited to see if anything else was coming, but they were silent. ‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘Pleasant memories. What kind of memories will Claire and I have after this?’

‘Paul, don’t be silly,’ Serge said. ‘We’re talking about our children’s futures here. To say nothing of my own future.’

‘But he’s right,’ Claire said.

‘Oh no, please,’ Serge said.

‘No, no pleases,’ Claire said. ‘What it’s about is the casual way you appropriate everything that’s ours. That’s what Paul is saying. You talk about our children’s futures. But you’re not really interested in them, Serge. You’ve co-opted that future. Just as casually as you co-opt a café as a backdrop to your press conference. Only because that will make it seem more authentic. It doesn’t even occur to you to ask what we think about it.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Babette said. ‘You talk about that press conference as though it’s going to go ahead. I was expecting something more from the two of you, I’d hoped you’d at least try to talk him out of this craziness. Especially from you, Claire. After what you said to me in the garden.’

‘Is that what this is all about?’ Serge said. ‘About your café? I didn’t realize it was your café. I thought it was a public establishment, open to one and all. Please forgive me.’

‘It’s our son,’ Claire said. ‘And yes, it’s also our café. Maybe we don’t have any control over how it’s used, but that’s the way it feels. But Paul’s right when he says that you can’t explain something like that. You either understand it, or you don’t.’

Serge pulled his cell phone from his pocket and looked at the screen. ‘Excuse me. I have to take this.’ He held the phone to his ear, slid back his chair and began rising to his feet. ‘Hello, Serge Lohman here … Hello.’

‘Holy fuck!’ Babette threw her napkin down on the table. ‘Holy fuck,’ she said again.

Serge had moved a few steps away from our table, he was bent over at the waist, plugging his other ear with two fingers. ‘No, it’s not that,’ I was able to make out. ‘It’s more complicated than that.’ Then he walked off past the other tables, heading for the toilets or the front entrance.

Claire took her cell phone from her bag. ‘I need to check with Michel,’ she said, looking at me. ‘What time is it? I don’t want to wake him up.’

I never wear a watch. Ever since they put me on non-active I’ve tried to live by the position of the sun, the rotation of the earth, the intensity of the daylight.

Claire knew that I had stopped wearing a watch.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. I felt something, a tingling at the back of my neck, it was because of the way my wife kept looking at me – kept staring at me, that was more like it – that I got the feeling I was being drawn into something, even though at that point I hadn’t the faintest idea what.

It was better than being drawn into nothing, I thought. It was better than ‘Your father doesn’t know about any of this.’

Claire leaned over to Babette.

‘What is it?’ Babette asked.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ Claire asked.

Babette pulled her cell phone out of her purse and looked at the screen. Then she said the time. She didn’t put her phone back, she put it on the table in front of her. She didn’t say to Claire: But you can see what time it is on your own phone, can’t you?

‘The poor darling has been home alone all evening,’ Claire said. ‘He may be almost sixteen, he tries to act grown-up, but still …’

‘Some things, though, they’re not too young for,’ Babette said.

Claire was silent for a moment, she ran the tip of her tongue across her lower lip: she always does that when she’s getting angry. ‘Sometimes I think that’s precisely where we’re mistaken,’ she said. ‘Maybe we don’t take that seriously enough, Babette. How young they are. To the outside world they’re suddenly adults, because they did something that we, as adults, consider a crime. But I feel that they’ve responded to it more like children. That’s exactly what I was trying to tell Serge. That we don’t have the right to take away their childhood, simply because, according to our norms, as adults, it’s a crime you should have to pay for for the rest of your life.’

Babette sighed deeply. ‘I’m afraid you’re right, Claire. There’s something gone, something … his spontaneity. He was always so … well, you two know what Rick was like. But that Rick isn’t there any more. For the last few weeks he’s just stayed in his room. At the table, he barely says a word. It’s something about the way he looks, something miserable, as though he’s worrying all the time. He never used to do that, worry.’

‘But it’s really important how you deal with that. How the two of you deal with that. I mean, maybe he’s so worried because he thinks that’s what you expect him to be.’

Babette remained silent: she laid a hand on the table, fingers flat, and pushed her cell phone half an inch away from her. ‘I don’t know, Claire. His father … I think his father expects him to worry more than I do, although it might not be completely fair for me to say that. But Rick often has a hard enough time as it is, because of who his father is. At school. With friendships. I mean, he’s only fifteen, he’s still very much the son-of. But alongside that he’s also the son of someone whose face everyone sees all the time on TV. He wonders about his friendships, sometimes. He thinks people are nice to him because of his famous father. Or the other way around: that teachers sometimes treat him unfairly because they have a problem with that. I remember it so clearly, when he went to secondary school, he said to me: “Mama, it’s like I get to start all over again!” He was so happy. But after a week everyone at school already knew who he was.’

‘And soon the whole school will know something else too. If it’s up to Serge.’

‘That’s what I keep telling him. That Rick has already suffered so much for who his father is, more than can be good for him. And now Serge wants to drag him into this mess. He’ll never get over that.’

I thought about Beau, about the adopted African son who could do no wrong in Babette’s eyes.

‘With Michel we’ve noticed that, what you call spontaneity, well, he’s still got that. Of course he doesn’t have a famous father, but still … It doesn’t bother him so much. Sometimes I even worry about that, because it doesn’t seem to have sunk in, what this could all mean for his future. In that way he really does react more like a child. A carefree child, not a worried adult, old before his time. That was the real dilemma for Paul and me. How we could make him aware of his responsibility without, at the same time, damaging his childish innocence.’

I looked at my wife. For Paul and me … How long ago was it that Claire and I still thought the other one didn’t know a thing? An hour ago? Fifty minutes? I looked at Serge’s untouched dame blanche: technically, just like with the rings of a tree or Carbon-14, it had to be possible to measure the passage of time by the melting of vanilla ice cream.

I looked into Claire’s eyes, the eyes of the woman who represented happiness to me. Without my wife I would have been nowhere, you hear sentimental men say that sometimes, ‘helpless’ is what they often call themselves: and indeed, all they mean is that their wives have been there to clean up after them all their lives and have kept bringing them cups of coffee at every hour of the day. I wouldn’t go that far; without Claire I wouldn’t have been nowhere, but I would have been somewhere else.

‘Claire and I keep telling ourselves that Michel needs to be able to go on with his life. We don’t want to talk him into a guilt complex. I mean, in some ways he is guilty of something, but that isn’t to say that a homeless person who lies down in the way in an ATM cubicle should suddenly become innocence itself. That’s the verdict you’d get soon enough if you left it up to the prevailing sense of justice around here. And that’s what you hear around you all the time too: what’s become of our wayward youth, never a word about wayward vagrants and homeless people who conk out wherever they feel like it. No, they want to set an example, just you wait and see; indirectly, the judges are worried about their own children. Who they maybe can’t control any longer either. We don’t want to hand Michel over to some lynch mob that’s only out for blood, the same lynch mob that’s crying out to reinstate the death penalty. Michel is too precious to us for that, for us to offer him up to that kind of gut reaction. What’s more, he himself is too intelligent for that. He stands head and shoulders above that.’

Throughout my little speech, Claire kept her eyes on me, the look and the smile she gave me now were part of our happiness. It was a happiness that could survive a lot, that outsiders couldn’t come between so easily.

‘Oh, I almost forgot!’ she said, holding up her cell phone now. ‘I was going to call Michel. What time did you say it was again?’ she asked Babette as she punched the first key – but she kept her eyes on me as she said it.

Once again, Babette checked the screen on her cell phone and told Claire the time.

I’m not going to say exactly what time it was. Exact times can turn on you later.

‘Hi, sweetheart!’ Claire said. ‘How are you doing? You’re not too bored, are you?’

I looked at my wife’s face. There was always something about that face, her eyes, that began to shine when she talked to our son on the phone. No, she was smiling and talking cheerfully – but she wasn’t shining.

‘Okay, we’re just going to drink our coffee, we’ll be home in about an hour. So you have time to clean up your own mess. What did you have for dinner …?’

She listened, nodded, said yes and no a few times and then, after a final ‘Bye, dearest, love you,’ she hung up.

Looking back on it, I don’t know if it was because of her face that didn’t shine, or whether it was because she hadn’t referred even once to our having seen our son in the restaurant garden, that I was suddenly certain that we had just witnessed a fine bit of acting.

But for whom was the act intended? For me? That didn’t seem likely. For Babette? But to what end? On two occasions, Claire had asked Babette emphatically to tell her what time it was – as though to make sure Babette wouldn’t forget later on.

Your father doesn’t know about any of this.

And suddenly his father knew.

‘The espressos were for …?’ It was one of the serving-girls-in-black. She was carrying a silver tray with two cups of espresso and two weensy little glasses of grappa.

And it was while she was putting down the cups and glasses in front of us that my wife pursed her lips, as if for a kiss.

She looked at me – and then kissed the air between us.

DIGESTIF

40

It wasn’t so long ago that Michel had written an essay about capital punishment. An essay for history class. It was prompted by a documentary about murderers who served their sentence, returned to society and often, within almost no time, committed another murder. Advocates and opponents of the death penalty were given their say. There was an interview with an American psychiatrist who argued that some people should never be set free again. ‘We have to accept that there are real monsters out there,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘Monsters who should never, under any condition, be released.’

A few days later I saw the first few pages of Michel’s essay lying on his desk. As a cover illustration he had downloaded a picture from the Internet, a photograph of the hospital bed on which, in some American states, the lethal injection was administered.

‘If I can help with anything …’ I’d said; and a few more days later he had shown me his first, rough draft.

‘What I really need to know from you,’ he said, ‘is whether I can do this.’

‘Do what?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think things … Then I don’t know whether you’re really allowed to think things like that.’

I read the rough draft – and I was impressed. For a fifteen-year-old, Michel had a refreshing way of looking at any number of aspects of crime and punishment. He had thought through several moral dilemmas to their most extreme consequences. I understood what he meant about things you might not be allowed to think.

‘Very good,’ I said, handing it back to him. ‘And I wouldn’t worry if I were you. You’re allowed to think whatever you like. There’s no reason to put on the brakes at this point. You’ve written it all down very clearly. Let the others try to poke holes in it first, if they can.’

From then on he let me read the subsequent versions as well. We discussed the moral dilemmas. I have fond memories of that period: only fond memories.

Less than a week after he had turned in his essay, I was called into the principal’s office; or, at least, I received a telephone invitation to come in, on a given day, at a certain time, and talk about my son, Michel. On the phone, I asked the principal whether there was anything special I should know. Even though I suspected that it was about his essay on capital punishment, I wanted to hear it from the man’s own mouth – but he brushed the question aside: ‘There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about, but not on the phone,’ he said.

On the afternoon in question I reported to his office. The principal invited me to sit down in a chair across from his desk.

‘I want to talk to you about Michel,’ he started in right away; I crossed my legs, fought back the urge to say, ‘Of course, who else?’ and assumed the pose of a careful listener.

On the wall behind him was a gigantic poster for an aid organization, I can’t remember whether it was Oxfam Novib or UNICEF: you saw a parched, seemingly barren field; at the bottom left was a child dressed in rags, holding up his skinny little hand.

The poster put me even more on my guard. The principal was probably against global warming and injustice in general. Perhaps he didn’t eat the flesh of mammals, and was anti-American, or in any case anti-Bush – the latter stance gave people carte blanche not to think about anything any more. Anyone who was against Bush had his heart in the right place, and could behave like a boorish asshole towards anyone around him.

‘Until now, we have always been quite pleased with Michel,’ the principal said.

I smelled something peculiar, it wasn’t what you’d call a sweaty smell, more like the odour of garbage that’s been separated for collection – or, to be precise, the separated garbage that usually ends up in the green container. I couldn’t escape the impression that the odour was coming from the principal himself; maybe he didn’t use deodorant, in order to spare the ozone layer, or else his wife washed his clothes in environmentally friendly detergent; as everyone knows, detergents like that turn white clothes grey after a while – clean is one thing they will never be again.

‘But recently, he wrote an essay for his history class that we find rather alarming,’ the principal went on. ‘Or at least, it caught the eye of our history teacher, Mr Halsema, who then came to me with the paper in question.’

‘About capital punishment,’ I said, just to put an end to this beating around the bush.

The principal looked at me for a moment; his eyes had something dull about them, expressionless, the bored look of a mediocre intelligence that wrongly supposes it has ‘seen it all before’.

‘Indeed,’ he said; he picked up something from his desk and began leafing through it. Capital punishment, I saw in familiar white letters against a black background, and below that the picture of the hospital bed.

‘It’s mostly these passages,’ the principal said. ‘Here: “… given the inhumanity involved in capital punishment as practised by the state, one might wonder whether, for some offenders, it wouldn’t be better if they – at a much earlier stage—”’

‘You don’t have to read it out loud, I know what it says.’

The look on the principal’s face said that he was not accustomed to being interrupted. ‘Indeed,’ he said again. ‘So, you’re familiar with the contents?’

‘Not only that, I helped my son here and there. Little bits of advice, but of course he wrote the lion’s share of it himself.’

‘But apparently you didn’t see any need to advise him concerning the section about what I will refer to as “taking the law into one’s own hands”?’

‘No. But I protest against the phrase “taking the law into one’s own hands”.’

‘So what would you call it? This is clearly about applying the death penalty before a trial has taken place.’

‘But it’s also about the inhumanity of capital punishment. The cold, clinical capital punishment carried out by the state. With a hypodermic needle, or the electric chair. About all those grisly details of the last meal that the condemned man is allowed to choose for himself. Your favourite dish, one last time, whether that’s caviar with champagne or a Double Whopper from Burger King.’

The dilemma I was faced with was one every parent faces sooner or later: you want to defend your child, of course, you step up for your child, but you mustn’t do it too vehemently, and above all not too eloquently – you mustn’t drive anyone into a corner. The educators, the teachers will let you have your say, but afterwards they’ll take revenge on your child. You may come up with better arguments – it’s not too hard to come up with better arguments than the educators, the teachers – but in the end your child is going to pay for it, their frustration at being shown up is something they’ll take out on the student.

‘We all see it that way,’ the principal said. ‘Normal people with healthy minds see capital punishment as inhuman. That’s not what I’m talking about, Michel has presented that extremely well. I’m only talking about the section in which he tries to justify the liquidation of suspects, accidentally or otherwise, before they have had their day in court.’

‘I consider myself normal and healthy. And I also consider capital punishment to be inhuman. But unfortunately, we also share this world with inhuman humans. Should those inhuman humans be allowed, after deducting a few years for good behaviour, to re-enter society? I think that’s what Michel is talking about.’

‘So then you should simply be allowed to shoot them or, how does he put it?’ – he leafed through the essay again – ‘“throw them out the window”? The tenth-floor window of police headquarters, I believe. That is, to say the least, hardly the way things go under the rule of law.’

‘No, but now you’re taking it out of context. This is about the worst kind of human beings; Michel is talking about men who rape children, who hold them prisoner for years. And there are other factors that play a role as well. During a trial, all that filth has to be dredged up again in the name of a “fair legal process”. But who’s actually waiting for that to happen? Those children’s parents? That’s the crucial point you’re sort of skipping over now. No, civilized people don’t throw other people out the window. And they also don’t let a pistol go off by accident on the way from a police station to a jail. But we’re not talking here about civilized people. These are people everyone would be relieved not to have around any more.’

‘Yes, that was it. Shooting a suspect in the head, supposedly by accident. In the back of the police van, now I remember.’ The principal put the paper back down on his desk. ‘Was that one of your “little bits of advice”, Mr Lohman? Or did your son come up with that all by himself?’

Something about his tone of voice made the hair stand up on the back of my neck; at the same time, I felt a tingling in my fingertips or, to put it more precisely, my fingertips went numb. I was on my guard. I wanted to give Michel all due credit for his essay – he was, in any case, more intelligent than the moronic heap of compost sitting across the desk from me – but on the other hand, I needed to protect him from being harassed in the future. They could suspend him, it occurred to me, they could kick him out of school. Michel felt at home here, this was where his friends were.

‘I have to admit that he may have let himself be somewhat swayed by my own opinions on such matters,’ I said. ‘I have rather outspoken ideas of my own about what should happen to those suspected of certain crimes. Consciously or unconsciously perhaps, I may have sort of pressed those ideas on him.’

The principal looked at me inquisitively, in so far as you can call a sub-intelligent look inquisitive. ‘But you just said that your son wrote the lion’s share of it himself.’

‘That’s right. By “lion’s share”, I mostly meant the passages in which state-implemented capital punishment is referred to as inhuman.’

When faced with lower intelligences, the most effective strategy in my opinion is to tell a barefaced lie: with a lie, you give the pin-heads a chance to retreat without losing face. And what’s more, did I really remember any more which parts of the essay had been my idea, and which had been Michel’s? I could recall a conversation, a conversation at the dinner table, about a murderer on probationary release, a murderer who had been out only a few days and who had most probably already killed someone else.

‘They should never let someone like that go again,’ Michel had said.

Never let him go, or never put him back in prison? I’d asked; Michel was fifteen, we talked to him about everything, he was interested in everything: the war in Iraq, terrorism, the Middle East – at school they hardly dealt with all that, he claimed, they just talked around it.

‘What do you mean by “never put him back in prison”?’ he asked.

‘Well, just that,’ I said. ‘Exactly what I said.’

I looked at the principal. This gob of slime, who believed in global warming and the total eradication of all war and injustice, probably also subscribed to the belief that you could cure rapists and serial killers; that, after years of gabbing with a psychiatrist, they could be allowed to take their first, shaky steps back into the real world.

The principal, who so far had been leaning back slightly in his chair, now leaned forward and placed both forearms – palms down, fingers spread – on his desk.

‘If I’m not mistaken, you once worked in teaching yourself?’ he said.

The little hairs on the back of my neck and my tingling fingers had not betrayed me: when the lower intelligences are about to lose an argument, they grasp at other straws in order to justify themselves.

‘I taught for a few years, yes,’ I said.

‘That was at […], wasn’t it?’ He mentioned the name of the school, a name that still produced mixed feelings in me, like the name of a disease of which you have been officially cured, but which you know could turn up any moment again in some other part of the body.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And you were placed on non-active.’

‘Not exactly. I was the one who suggested that I take it a bit easier for a while. That I would come back later, when everything had calmed down a little.’

The principal cleared his throat and looked at a piece of paper that was lying in front of him. ‘But in fact, you didn’t go back. In fact, you’ve been unemployed for almost ten years.’

‘On non-active. I could go back to work tomorrow, somewhere else.’

‘According to my information though, the information […] sent me, that depends on a psychiatric report. Whether or not you can go back to work. That decision, in other words, is not up to you.’

Again, the name of that school! I felt the muscles beneath my left eye start to twitch, it was nothing, but others might interpret it as a tic. That’s why I acted as though I had something in my eye, I rubbed it with my fingers, but the twitching only seemed to get worse.

‘Oh, that doesn’t really mean much,’ I said. ‘I assure you, I don’t need a psychiatrist’s signature in order to exercise my profession.’

The principal looked at the piece of paper again. ‘That’s not what it says here … here it says—’

‘Could I look at what you’ve got there in front of your face?’ My voice was sharp, commanding, and left no room for misunderstanding. Still, the principal didn’t do what I said right away.

‘If you would let me finish,’ he said. ‘A few weeks ago I happened to run into a former colleague who works at […] these days. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, we were talking, I believe, about the pressure on teachers in general. About burnouts and nervous collapses. He mentioned a name that sounded familiar to me. I didn’t know why at first, but then I thought of Michel. And then you.’

‘I’ve never had a burn-out. That’s just a trendy term. And I’ve absolutely never suffered a nervous collapse.’

Now it was the principal’s turn to blink, I saw, and even though it wasn’t what you would have called a tic, not by any stretch of the imagination, still it was a sign of sudden weakness. Or, in fact, of fear. I wasn’t aware of it myself, but perhaps there was something about my voice – I had spoken those last few sentences quite slowly, more slowly than before, in any case – something that made the warning lights start to flash in the principal’s mind.

‘But I didn’t say that you’d had a burn-out,’ he said.

He drummed with his fingers on the desk. And he blinked his eyes again! Yes, something had changed, the pedantic tone in which he’d tried to sell me his wishy-washy theories about capital punishment had disappeared as well.

I could smell it clearly now, above the odour of compost: fear. The way a dog can smell when someone is afraid, I detected a vague, sourish smell that hadn’t been there before.